ts drive hummed and it drove far and away from
the seemingly unharmed but completely helpless _Isis_. Bors looked
regretfully back at the abandoned light cruiser. Sunlight glinted on its
hull. Somehow a slow rotary motion had been imparted to it during the
process of abandoning ship. The little fighting ship pointed as though
wistfully at all the stars about her, to none of which she would ever
drive again.

The _Sylva_ loomed up. The last space-boat nestled into its blister and
the grapples clanked. The leaves closed. When the blister air-pressure
showed normal and green lights flashed and flashed, Bors got out of the
boat and went to the _Sylva's_ control-room. Gwenlyn was there, quite
casually controlling the operation of the yacht by giving suggestions to
its official skipper. She turned and beamed at Bors.

"We'll pull off a way," she observed, "and make sure your time-bomb
works. You wouldn't want her discovered and salvaged."

"No," said Bors.

He stood by a viewport as the _Sylva_ drove away. The _Isis_ ceased to
be a shape and became the most minute of motes. Bors looked at his
watch.

"Not far enough yet," he said depressedly. "Everything will go."

The yacht drove on. Fifteen--twenty minutes at steadily increasing
solar-system speed.

"It's about due," said Bors.

Gwenlyn came and stood beside him. They looked together out at the
stars. There were myriads upon myriads of them, of all the colors of the
spectrum, of all degrees of brightness, in every possible asymmetric
distribution.

There was a spark in remoteness. Instantly it was vastly more than a
spark. It was a globe of deadly, blue-white incandescence. It flamed
brilliantly as all the _Isis's_ fuel and the warheads on all its
unexpended missiles turned to pure energy in the hundred-millionth of a
second. It was many times brighter than a sun. Then it was not. And the
violence of the explosion was such that there was not even glowing
metal-vapor where it had been. Every atom of the ship's substance had
been volatilized and scattered through so many thousands of cubic miles
of emptiness that it did not show even as a mist.

"A good ship," said Bors grimly. Then he growled. "I wonder if they saw
that on Garen and what they thought about it!" He straightened himself.
"How did you know we were in trouble?"

"There's a Talent," said Gwenlyn matter-of-factly, "who can always tell
how people feel. She doesn't know what they think or why. But she