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There was no sensation attached to overdrive travel except at the beginning and the end. It was now time for the end. He might find most anything having happened. His plans might immediately be seen to be hopeless. Weald could have sent ships to Dara, or Dara might be in such a state of desperation.... As it turned out, Dara was desperate.
The attitude of the First Admiral would have been perfectly logical in ordinary times. Anything like the new intermediate, low-power overdrive field should have been proposed through channels, examined by a duly-appointed commission of officers, reported on, the report evaluated, and then painstaking and lengthy tests made and the report on the tests evaluated.
Actually, each ship of the Mekinese fleet was in overdrive, which meant that each had stressed the space immediately around it so that it was like a cocoon of other-space; as if it were out of this cosmos altogether and in another. In sober fact, of course, nothing of the sort had happened. An overdrive field changed the physical constants of space.
Bors aimed the ship according to the calculation Logan had given him, scrupulously setting the breakout timer to the exact figure listed. He was still uncomfortable about the destruction of the Mekinese cruiser when he said curtly, "Overdrive coming!" He'd have preferred a more sportsmanlike type of warfare.
Traffic handled such events as a matter of course. So Sergeant Madden dozed during most of the first day of overdrive. He reflected somnolently when awake that it was fitting for Timmy's father to be on the job when Timmy's girl was in difficulty, since Timmy was off somewhere else. On the second day he conversed more or less with Patrolman Willis. Willis was a young cop, almost as young as Timmy.
It had seen the Horus go into overdrive and move only hundreds of miles instead of hundreds of millions. It had seen the Horus vanish from one place and appear at another in the same combat area, launch missiles and vanish again before it could even be ranged. The last Mekinese ship certainly carried with it the Horus's tactics and actions recorded on tape.
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.
It was at the most extreme limit of the radar's range. A ship had come out of overdrive near the fourth planetary orbit of this solar system. Bors and the yeoman computer-operator figured its distance to six places of decimals. Bors set the microsecond timer. The Horus went into low-speed overdrive and out again.
Nobody'd stay behind, but somebody might have gotten left." He rose, to take over the captured ship. Normally, at overdrive cruising speed, it would be a week's journey from Walden to the planet Krim. Hoddan made it in five days. There was reason. He wanted to beat the news of his piracy to Krim.
He busied himself with those astrogational chores which began with orienting oneself to galactic directions after leaving a planet which rotates at its own individual speed. Then one computes the overdrive course to another planet, from the respective coördinates of the world one is leaving and the one one aims for.
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