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Seth, his brother, was jealous, and by treachery enticed Osiris into a box, which he closed and threw into the water. Isis sought for the body of her husband until she found it, and Isis and Nephthys, her sister, sat at his head and feet and bewailed him. Re, the greatest of the gods, heard Isis's complaint; his heart was touched, and he sent Anubis to bury Osiris.

The radar-screen showed tiny specks darting out from that larger speck which was the battleship. They came hurtling toward the Isis. Bors counted them. A ship of the Isis's class mounted eighteen launching-tubes. She should be able to fire eighteen missiles at a time. The Mekinese ship had fired nineteen.

For a ship of the Isis's class to have challenged a battleship to combat, to have deliberately and insultingly waited for it to choose its own battle-distance, and then to let it launch its missiles first.... It was no ambush! Bors did not feel ashamed of this fight.

They began a long, shallow, screaming descent from the farthest limits of the planet's atmosphere. Out where the sun of Garen was a disk of intolerable brilliance and heat, the battleship bumbled on its way. It would seem that its commander scornfully accepted the Isis's terms of combat and moved contemptuously to the position where his weapons would be most deadly.

The blister doors closed. Bors went back to the control room. He began to set up the computations for astrogation from the sun of Glamis to the sun of Tralee. He shortly heard the sound of arrivals via the Isis's airlock. Presently, his second-in-command reported fifty additional hands aboard. They included astrogators, drive-engineers and assorted specialists.

There were boomings, which rose to bellowings as devastation tore away from the Isis's launching-tubes. Bors said irritably to the rocket-room: "Take her up!" And then the ship lifted on her rockets they were not solely for emergency use, as on cargo-ships and rushed toward the sky. As the ship mounted on its column of writhing smoke, other smoky columns spouted up. Six of them.

So when the Mekinese battlewagon came lumbering up to space, with her missile-tubes armed and bristling, Bors withdrew the Isis. It was not flight. It was a move designed to make sure that when the fight began there would be no stray missiles falling on the planet. Unseen, the Isis's space-boats floated in darkness. They carried ten men each, equipped with small arms and light bombs.

More missiles erupted from the battleship, aimed to intercept. They also failed. The battleship began to fling out every missile it possessed, in a frantic effort to knock out the Isis's erratic missiles, which neither instruments nor eyes were able to follow accurately enough to establish a pattern of destination. Half a dozen ground-cars roared through the streets of the capital city of Garen.

After clearance with the flagship, the little warship aimed with painstaking exactitude at Tralee's sun, making due allowance for its proper motion, Glamis's proper motion, the length of time the light he aimed by had been on its way, the distance, and the Isis's travel-rate in overdrive. Presently Bors said, "Overdrive coming!" and counted down. After "one" he pressed a button.

The Osiris myth has better literary form and more cultic significance. The slaying of Osiris by Set, Isis's search for the body of her husband, and the rôle of the young Horus as avenger of his father make a coherent history. Osiris had the singular fortune of being the most widely popular god in Egypt, the hero of a romantic episode, and the ethical judge of men in the Underworld.