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He asks that you receive him when you can, sir." Bors's apparent lack of surprise was real. He wasn't surprised. But he was annoyed with himself for expecting something so impossible as the Sylva tracing the fleet through an overdrive voyage of days to a most unlikely destination like Glamis. "Tell him to come aboard," he commanded.
Calhoun had presented them with that estate over their bitter objection. But they would glory in it, if they reached Dara. Maril looked at him with very strange eyes. "Now what?" she asked. "We hang around," said Calhoun, "to see if anybody comes up from Weald to find out what's happened. It's always possible to pick up a sort of signal when a ship goes into overdrive.
There were many, many times more than her air apparatus and reserve tanks could possibly have taken care of. They couldn't even have been fed during the journey from Orede to Weald. But they hadn't starved. Air-scarcity killed them before the ship came out of overdrive. A remarkable thing was that there was no written message in the ship's log which referred to its takeoff.
A little before the Med Ship was due to break out from overdrive, the girl said very carefully, "You've been very kind. I'd like to thank you. I I didn't really believe I would live to get to Orede." Calhoun raised his eyebrows. "I wish I could tell you everything you want to know," she added regretfully. "I think you're ... really decent. But some thing...."
He came to first-breakout, a light-week short of Mekin. The yellow sun flamed dead ahead. He determined his distance from it with very great care. The Horus went back into overdrive and out again, and it was well within the system, though carefully not on the plane of its ecliptic. Then the Horus waited. She was twenty millions of miles from the planet Mekin.
One of the grain-ships from Weald had broken out of overdrive and its pilot was triumphantly calling for landing-coördinates. The grid office relayed his call to loudspeaker circuits as the quickest way to get it on the communication system of the whole planet. "Calling ground," boomed the triumphant voice of the first of the student pilots Calhoun had trained. "Calling ground!
There would be many times the space-traffic here that would be found off any other planet in the Mekinese empire. One ship got to ground unchallenged. By pure accident it came out of overdrive within half a million miles of Mekin. To have attacked it would have been noted. But he got two more cargo-ships. Then he found the Horus alongside a passenger-ship.
Will you carry a message for me?" "Happy to oblige, Captain!" "Tell them that " Then Bors stopped short. It was not probable that the fleet wave-form and frequency were known to Mekinese ships. But the possibility of low-speed overdrive travel was much too important a military secret to risk under any circumstances. He said, "I'll be along very shortly with some highly encouraging news."
Reports came in, orders were issued, admirably crisp salutes were exchanged among sag-suited men.... Everything was in perfect shape there. But there was panic among the ships in space. Communicators gave off horrified, panic-stricken yells. There were screamings. Intelligible communications ceased. Ships plunged crazily this way and that. Some vanished in overdrive.
Nearer the sun, on the far side of its orbit, there was the planet Garen. The Isis drove for that planet, while Bors tried to decide whether the remarkable accuracy of this breakout was due to accident or to Logan's computations. Logan appeared as Bors was gloomily contemplating the days needed to reach Garen on solar system drive, because overdrive was too fast.
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