ideas came to be, there were a score of other planets
which would have to be considered too.

He sketched out in his own mind a course of action that would be
possible to follow after breakout off Mekin. It did not follow the rules
for sound planning, which always assume that if things can go wrong they
will. Bors could only plan for what might be done if things went right.
But he could not hope. Not really. Still, he considered every
possibility, however far-fetched.

He came to first-breakout, a light-week short of Mekin. The yellow sun
flamed dead ahead. He determined his distance from it with very great
care. The _Horus_ went back into overdrive and out again, and it was
well within the system, though carefully not on the plane of its
ecliptic.

Then the _Horus_ waited. She was twenty millions of miles from the
planet Mekin. Bors ordered that for intervals of up to five minutes no
electronic apparatus on the ship should be in operation. In those
periods of electronic silence, his radars swept all of space except
Mekin. He had no desire to have Mekin pick up radar-pulses and wonder
what they came from. The rest of the system, though, he mapped. He found
two meteor-streams, and a clump of three planetoids in a nearly circular
orbit, and he spotted a ship just lifted from Mekin by its landing-grid.
It went out to five planetary diameters and flicked out of existence so
far as radar was concerned.

It had gone into overdrive and away. Another ship came around Mekin, in
orbit. It reached the spot from which the first ship had vanished. It
began to descend; the landing-grid had locked onto it with projected
force-fields and was drawing it down to ground.

Bors growled to himself. It was not likely that this ship was the one
he'd pursued, sight unseen, since the end of the fight off Meriden. But
it was a possibility. If it were true, then everything that mattered to
Bors was lost forever.

Then a blip appeared. It was at the most extreme limit of the radar's
range. A ship had come out of overdrive near the fourth planetary orbit
of this solar system.

Bors and the yeoman computer-operator figured its distance to six places
of decimals. Bors set the microsecond timer. The _Horus_ went into
low-speed overdrive and out again. Then the electron telescope revealed
a stubby, rotund cargo-ship, about to land on Mekin.

Bors swore. It would be days before this tub reached Mekin on
solar-system drive. But it must not rep