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In short, a ship could drive at many hundreds of times the velocity of light and the laws of Einstein did not apply, because his laws referred to space that men had not tampered with. But though ships in overdrive had to be considered as in motion, and though their speed had to be considered as beyond the astronomical, there were such incredible distances to be covered that time piled up.
Familiar microörganisms and a standard vegetation added to the practicality of human settlements on otherwise alien worlds. But sometimes the results were strange. They weren't often so strange, however, as to cause some hundreds of men to pack themselves frantically aboard a cargo-ship which couldn't possibly sustain them, so that every man must die while the ship was in overdrive.
Pride and rage swept through Mekinese commanders, as they saw the Kandarians deliberately break up their formation to get their ships down to the level of the enemy. It was unthinkable for a Mekinese ship to refuse single combat! And when two and three could combine against a single ship of Kandar.... The invaders had reason to fight, rather than slip into overdrive.
Sergeant Madden settled some things in his mind and dozed off again. When the squad ship came out of overdrive and he was awakened by the unpleasantness of breakout, he yawned. He looked on without comment as Patrolman Willis matter-of-factly performed the tricky task of determining the ecliptic while a solar system's sun was little more than a first-magnitude star.
You just figured an overdrive jump for me that's the most accurate I ever heard of! But I'm desperate for time and we've got to spend two days in solar-system drive because we can't make an overdrive hop of less than light-days! So we're losing forty-eight hours or more." Logan said as stridently as before: "But I just showed you you don't have to! Cut the field-strength according to that table."
The little Med Ship came out of overdrive and the stars were strange and the Milky Way seemed unfamiliar. Which, of course, was because the Milky Way and the local Cepheid marker-stars were seen from an unaccustomed angle and a not-yet-commonplace pattern of varying magnitudes. But Calhoun grunted in satisfaction. There was a banded sun off to port, which was good.
And in two days, or three, Calhoun would be escorted back to the landing-grid, and lifted out to space, and he'd spend long empty days in overdrive and land somewhere else to do the whole thing all over again. It all happened exactly as he expected, with one exception. Every human being he met on Weald wanted to talk about blueskins. Blueskins and the idea of blueskins obsessed everyone.
There was plenty of mention of Dara, and blueskins, and of the vicious political fight now going on to see which political party could promise the most complete protection against blueskins. After a full hour of it, Calhoun flipped off his receptor and swung the Med Ship to an exact, painstakingly precise aim at the sun around which Dara rolled. He said, "Overdrive coming, Murgatroyd!"
A superior officer should never do anything useful, so long as a subordinate isn't making a serious mistake. That is the way subordinates are trained to become superiors, in time. Patrolman Willis set a time-switch and pushed the overdrive button. The squad ship hopped, and abruptly the local sun had a perceptible disk.
He found two meteor-streams, and a clump of three planetoids in a nearly circular orbit, and he spotted a ship just lifted from Mekin by its landing-grid. It went out to five planetary diameters and flicked out of existence so far as radar was concerned. It had gone into overdrive and away. Another ship came around Mekin, in orbit. It reached the spot from which the first ship had vanished.
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