ed fifty additional
hands aboard. They included astrogators, drive-engineers and assorted
specialists.

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. There was the singularly unpleasant sensation of
going into overdrive. Then the small fighting ship was alone in its
cocoon of warped and twisted space. Until it came out again, there was
no possible way by which any message could reach it or its existence be
detected or proved. Theory said, in fact, that the cosmos could explode
and a ship in overdrive would be unaware of the fact so long as it
stayed in overdrive.

But Bors's light cruiser came out where the sun of Tralee was a disk of
intolerable brilliance, and all the stars in every direction looked
exactly as usual.

Chapter 6

The _Isis_ approached Tralee from the night side, and at a time when the
planet's spaceport faced the sun. Tralee was not a base for Mekinese
war-craft. To the contrary, it was strictly a conquered world. It was
desirable for Mekinese ships to be able to appear as if magically and
without warning in its skies. There would be no far-ranging radars on
the planet except at its solitary spaceport. Mekinese ships could come
out of overdrive, time a solar-system-drive approach to arrive at
Tralee's atmosphere in darkness, and be hovering menacingly overhead
when dawn broke. Such an appearance had strong psychological effects
upon the population.

Bors used the same device with modifications.

His ship plunged out of the sunrise and across half a continent,
descending as it flew. When it reached the planet's capital city, there
had been less than a minute between the first notification by radar and
its naked-eye visibility. When it came into sight at the spaceport it
was less than four thousand feet high and it went sweeping for the
landing-grid at something over mach one. Its emergency-rockets roared.
It decelerated smoothly and crossed the upper rim of the great, lacy
metal structure with less than a hundred feet to spare. In fractions of
an additional minute it was precisely aground some fifty yards from the
spaceport office. Steam and smoke rose