t come. The fleet of
Kandar had not returned. The caretaker government met in council and
desperately made guesses. It arrived at no hopeful conclusion whatever.
The most probable--because most hopeless--conviction seemed to be that
the fleet of Mekin had been met and fought, but that it was victorious,
and in retaliation for resistance it had gone away to send back swarms
of grisly bomb-carriers which would drop atomic bombs in such quantity
that for a thousand years to come there would be no life on Kandar.

The light cruiser, the _Isis_, was unaware of these frustrations. It
remained in overdrive, where absolutely nothing happened.

Bors reviewed his actions and could not but approve of them tepidly.
He'd sent food to the fleet, he'd destroyed two enemy fighting ships and
he'd done what he could to harm the Mekinese puppets on Tralee. He'd had
them publicly humiliated with well-chosen epithets. He'd destroyed the
records and archives of the secret political police.... Many people on
Tralee already blessed him, without knowing who he was. There might yet
be hope of better days.

But all things end, even journeys at excessively great multiples of the
speed of light. The overdrive timer rang warning bells. Taped breakout
notifications sounded from speakers throughout the ship. There was a
count-down of seconds, and the abominably unpleasant sensation of
breakout, and the ship was in normal space again.

There was the sun of Garen, burning peacefully in a vast void with
millions of minute, unwinking lights in the firmament all about it.
There was a gas-giant planet, a mere fifteen million miles away. Further
out there were the smaller, frozen worlds. Nearer the sun, on the far
side of its orbit, there was the planet Garen.

The _Isis_ drove for that planet, while Bors tried to decide whether the
remarkable accuracy of this breakout was due to accident or to Logan's
computations.

Logan appeared as Bors was gloomily contemplating the days needed to
reach Garen on solar system drive, because overdrive was too fast. Logan
looked offhand and elaborately casual, but he fairly glowed with
triumph.

"I found out the fact behind the bugger factor, Captain," he said
condescendingly. "The speed of a ship in overdrive varies as the change
in mass to the minus fourth. Your computers couldn't tell that! Here's a
table for calculating the speed of a ship in overdrive according to its
mass and the strength of the overdrive fiel