ulously 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. He faced the old, deplorable fact that
fighting men had had to adjust to throughout the ages; one can fight an
honorable enemy honorably, but against some men scruples count as
handicaps.

"Swine!" growled Bors. "They'll make us like them!" Then into the
microphone he said, "Five, four, three, two, one...."

He pressed the overdrive button. The sensation of going into overdrive
was acutely uncomfortable, as always. Bors swallowed squeamishly and
took his cup of coffee.

The _Isis_, then, lay wrapped in a cocoon of stressed space. Its
properties included the fact that its particular type of stress could
travel much more swiftly than the stresses involved in the propagation
of radiation, of magnetism, or gravity. And this state of stress--this
overdrive field--did not have a position. It _was_ a position. The ship
inside it could not be said to be in the real cosmos at all, but when
the field collapsed it would be somewhere, and the way it pointed, and
how long before collapse, determined in what particular somewhere it
would be when it came out. But travel in overdrive was tedious.

As civilization increases man's control of the cosmos, it takes the fun
out of it. In prehistoric days a man who had to hunt animals or go
hungry may often have gone hungry, but he was never bored by the
sameness of his meals. A man who traveled on horseback often got to his
destination late, but he was not troubled with ennui on the way. In
overdrive, Bors's ship traveled almost with the speed of thought, but
there was absolutely nothing to think about while journeying. Not about
the journey, anyhow.

While the ship drove on, however, the cargo-ship seized on Tralee made
its way toward Glamis and a meeting with the fleet, then gloomily
sweeping in orbit around Glamis Two. The food it carried would raise
men's spirits a little, but it would not solve the problem of what the
fleet was to do. Morgan, on the flagship, expounded the ability of his
Talents to perform the incredible, but nobody could find any application
of the incredible to the fix the fleet was in. On Kandar, the population
knew that there had been a battle off the gas-giant planet, but they did
not know the result. The Mekinese fleet had no