and rose still higher, and the
planet Kandar became a gigantic ball which filled an enormous part of
the firmament. Then there were cracklings of communicators, and orders
flittered through emptiness in scrambled and re-scrambled broadcasts of
gibberish which came out as lucid commands in the control-rooms of the
ships. Then, first, the point, then the advanced flankers, and then the
main fleet, line by line and rank by rank--every ship drove on outward
under top-speed solar-system drive.

The last of the four chartered space-liners, come to take refugees away
before the Mekinese arrived, saw the disappearance of the ships in the
rear of the fleet's formation. The liner was lowered to the ground by
the landing-grid. It reported what it had seen. Those who were entitled
to depart on it crowded aboard. With the fleet gone, panic began.

Morgan had to spend lavishly to get copies of the news reports that the
liner had brought along as a matter of course. He took them back to the
_Sylva_, where a frowning man with rings on his fingers read them with
dark suspicion. Presently, triumphantly, he dictated predictions of
dirty tricks from indications in the news.

Morgan returned to what he'd called the family room of the yacht. He
relaxed. Gwenlyn tried to read. She did not succeed. She was excessively
nervous.

Bors was not. The fleet re-formed itself well out from Kandar. It made
for a rendezvous over a pole of the gas-giant planet which was the
fourth planet from Kandar's sun. It was almost, but not quite in line
with that yellow star toward the base, from which the Mekinese flotilla
would come. The fleet went into a polar orbit around that gigantic
planet, which was useless to mankind because its atmosphere was partly
gaseous ammonia and partly methane.

The cosmos paid no attention. An unstable sol-type star in Cygnus
collapsed abruptly and a number of otherwise promising planets became
unfit for human exploitation. In Andromeda, a super-nova flared. The
light of its explosion would not reach Kandar for very many thousands of
years. The largest comet in the galaxy reached perihelion, and
practically outshone the sun it circled. Nobody saw it, because nobody
lived there. On a dreary, red-sky planet in Mousset, a thing squirmed
heavily out of a stagnant sea and blinked stupidly at the remarkable
above-water cosmos it had discovered. Suns flamed and spouted flares.
Small dark stars became an infinitesimal fraction of a d