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He let out a metal-foil balloon which inflated itself, making a sphere some forty feet in diameter. In the new low-speed overdrive he drew away from it for a limited number of microseconds. He measured the distance run. He made other runs, again measuring. From ten thousand miles away he made a return-hop to the target-balloon and came out within a mile of it. He cheered up.
Instructions were already distributed and would have been studied and understood. The fleet would then go to Kandar if it appeared that the Mekinese grand fleet would go there and set up a dummy fleet of target-globes in war array. This would be a fleet, but not of fighting ships. It would be a fleet of metal-foil inflated balloons.
It was a bomb, blasting a metal-foil flimsy which the electronic brain of a missile-rocket could only perceive as an unidentified and hence enemy object. Bomb and rocket and flimsy metal foil turned together to radioactive metal vapor. Sergeant Madden knew professional admiration. "Thirty-four seconds!" he said approvingly.
This was one voyage in overdrive which was not tedious. Bors had to organize the ship for combat. He had to train launching-crews to work like high-speed machinery. He had to teach the setting of missiles for ranges he had to show how to measure. Once he stopped the ship between stars and all the launching-crews took shots at an inflated metal-foil target.
The Liberty vanished from its place in the formation of the dummy fleet, but left a metal-foil dummy where it had been. It reappeared a full five thousand miles away. The rushing missiles now were brighter. They were individual, microscopic specks like stars. They began visibly to converge upon the space occupied by the dummy fleet.
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