ff
Meriden, and the temporary escape of one of his enemies, and that he'd
pursued it to the solar system of Mekin itself and there destroyed it
while Mekin watched, helpless to interfere.

The distortion of facts was astounding. But the mere existence of facts
at this distance was impossible! Then Bors found himself thinking that
these tales sounded like fantasies or daydreams, and he went white. He
knew what had happened.

Just before he'd left the fleet, he'd talked to a fat woman and a
scowling man who, together, made up the Talents, Incorporated brand new
Department for Disseminating Truthful Seditious Rumors, so that rumors
of a high degree of detail got started, nobody knew how. If such rumors
spread, and everybody heard them, nobody would doubt them. It was
appallingly probable that the fighting on Cassis and Avino and Deccan
had no greater justification in reason than that an enormously fat woman
romantically pictured such things as resulting from the derring-do of
one Captain Bors, of whom she thought sentimentally and glamorously and
without much discrimination.

But she'd daydreamed about the fleet, too! And that it had destroyed a
Mekinese squadron many times its size....

He heard the leader of the young men from Deccan speaking humorously.
"Your revolt, sir," he told Bors, "is spreading everywhere! On Cela,
sir, there are great space-ship yards, where they build craft for the
Mekinese navy. Not long ago they finished one and it went out to space
for a trial run. It didn't come back. Sabotage. Everybody knew it. The
Mekinese raged. A little while later they finished another ship. But the
Mekinese were smart! They sent it off for its trial run with only Celans
on board. If there were sabotage this time, it wouldn't be Mekinese who
died in space! But that ship didn't come back either! It touched down
here, sir, three weeks ago, and we supplied it with food and missiles
and some of us joined it. It went off to try to find you."

"I'd better--go after it," said Bors, dry-throated. "It could blunder
into trouble. At best--"

The youthful leader of Deccan's revolt grinned widely.

"It's got plenty of missiles," he told Bors. "It can take care of
itself! And it has plenty of food. We even gave them target-balloons to
practice launching missiles on. We've been storing up missiles to lay an
ambush for a Mekinese squadron if one comes by. A lot of us joined the
ship, though."

"In any case," said Bors, with