There came a far-distant, roaring sound. Something silvery and glistening rose swiftly toward the sky. It dwindled to a speck. There were more roarings. Three more silvery, glistening objects flung themselves heavenward, leaving ma.s.sive trails of seemingly solid smoke behind them. Then there were bellowings. Larger ships rose up. As the din of their rising began to diminish, there were louder, booming uproars and other silvery objects seemed to fling themselves toward the sky.

Then thunder rolled, and huge shapes plunged in their turn toward the heavens. The s.p.a.ce-fleet of Kandar left its native world. It departed in the formation used for s.p.a.ce maneuvering, much like the tactical disposition of a column of marching soldiers in doubtful territory.

There was a "point" in advance of all the rest, to be the first to detect or be fired on by an enemy. Then flankers reached straight out, and to the right and left, and then an advance-guard, and then the main force with a rear-guard behind it.

The take-off area became invisible under a monstrous, roiling mountain of smoke, from which threads of vapor reached to emptiness. It became impossible to hear oneself talk; it was unlikely that one could have heard a shot, as the heavy ships took off. But presently there were only lesser clamors and then mere roarings after them, and the last of the rocket-boomings died away. The smoke remained, rolling very slowly aside. Then there were unexpected detonations. As the rocket-fume mist dissolved, the detonations were explained. Every building in the fleet's home area, the sunken fuel-tanks, the giant rolling gantries--every bit of ground equipment for the servicing of the fleet was methodically and carefully being blown to bits. The fleet was not expected back.

The ships rose above the atmosphere, 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 s.p.a.ce-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 ent.i.tled 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. n.o.body saw it, because n.o.body 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 degree colder.

There was a magnetic storm in the photosphere of a sun which was not supposed to have such things.

The war-fleet of Kandar, in very fine formation, flowed in its polar orbit around the fourth planet out from Kandar's sun. In carefully scrambled and re-scrambled communications, certain ships were authorized to modify the settings of Mark 13 missiles in this exact fashion, to remove their warheads, and to diverge in pairs from the fleet proper.

They were to familiarize themselves with the results of making the acceleration of such missiles variable during flight. They would use the supplied data-tables to compute firing constants for given ranges and relative speeds. They would, of course, return to formation to permit other ships the same practice with the new method of missile handling.

Bors read the letter from Talents, Incorporated. It gave an exact time for the breakout of the Mekinese fleet. The rest consisted mostly of specific warnings from the Talents, Incorporated Department for Predicting Dirty Tricks. It listed certain things to be looked for among the ships of the fleet. The information was like the news of an enemy ship aground on Kandar; it was self-evidently plausible once one thought of it. Mekin was ruled and its military practices governed by men with the instincts of conspirators, using other men with the psychopathological impulses which make for spies. They thought of devices neither statesmen nor fighting men would have invented. But a paranoid Talent could think of them, and know that they were true.

As a result of the warnings, the flagship was found to have been somehow equipped, by Mekin, with a tiny, special microwave transmitter which used a frequency not usual on Kandar. It was, in effect, a radio beacon on which enemy missiles could home. Also, the lead ship of a cruiser-squadron had been mysteriously geared to reveal its exact position, course and speed while in s.p.a.ce. There were other concealed devices. Some would make the controls of predetermined ships useless when beams of specific frequency and form were trained upon them.

Once the basic idea was discovered, it was possible to make sure that all such enemy-supplied equipment was out of operation. The fleet was still in no promising situation, with a ten-to-one disadvantage. But it could not have put up even the beginning of a fight, had these spy-installed devices remained undiscovered.

Bors said carefully, by scrambled and re-scrambled communicator, "Majesty, I'm beginning to be less than despairing. If they expect our ships either to have been destroyed aground, or to be made helpless the instant combat begins, we may give them a shock. We hoped to smash them ship for ship. Finding out their tricks in advance may give us that! And if our missiles work as they've promised, we may get two for one!"

King Humphrey's voice was dogged. "_I will settle for anything but surrender! From an honorable enemy I would take severe terms rather than see my s.p.a.cemen die. But I would do n.o.body any good by yielding to Mekin!_"

Bors clicked off. He looked at a clock. The prediction from Talents, Incorporated was that the Mekinese fleet would break out of overdrive at 11.19 hours astronomical time.

He went over his ship. His crew was by no means depressed. There had been a terrific lift in spirits when dummy-warheaded missiles made theoretic hits, though fifteen interceptors tried to stop them. The crewmen now tended elaborately to explain the process. A part of the trick was the curved path along which the re-set missiles flashed. Such courses alone could never be computed by an unwarned enemy under battle conditions. But the all-important thing was that the missiles changed their acceleration as they drove. That couldn't be solved and the solution put into practice during one fleet-action. Once the enemy had experienced it, they could later duplicate it without doubt, but it would still be impossible to counter.

So Bors's men were cheerful to the point of gaiety. They would fight magnificently because they were thinking of what they would do to the enemy instead of what the enemy might do to them. If enemy crews had been a.s.sured that the fleet was half defeated before the fight began, to find the fleet not crippled by spy-set devices would be startling. To find them fighting like fiends would be alarming. And if--Bors grimly repeated to himself, _if_--the modified missiles worked as well in battle as in target practice....

He turned in and, despite his tensions, fell asleep immediately and slept soundly. When he awoke he felt curiously relaxed. It took him a moment to realize he had dreamed about Gwenlyn. He couldn't remember what he had dreamed, but he knew it was comfortable and good. He wouldn't let himself dwell on it, however. There was work to be done.

It was singularly like morning on a planet. The ship was spotless, immaculate. There was the fresh smell of growing things in the air. To save tanked oxygen the air-room used vegetation to absorb CO{2} and excess moisture from the breathing of the crew. There was room to spare everywhere, because unlike aircraft and surface ships, the size of a s.p.a.ce-ship made no difference in its speed. There was no resistance due to size. Only the ma.s.s counted. So there was s.p.a.ciousness and freshness and something close to elation on Bors's ship on the day it was to fight for the high satisfaction of getting killed.

Bors saw to it that his men breakfasted heartily.

"We've got a party ahead," he told the watch at mess. "Eat plenty but give the other watch a chance to fill up, too."

Somebody said cheerfully, "The condemned men ate a hearty breakfast, sir?"

Bors grinned.

"The breakfast we can be sure of. The condemned part--we'll have something to say about that. Some Mekinese wouldn't have good appet.i.tes if they knew what's ahead of them. One word! Don't waste missiles! There are a lot of Mekin ships. We've got to make each missile count!"

There was laughter. He went to the control room. He checked with the clock. Shortly after the other watch was back at its stations he calculated carefully. The enemy fleet would break out of overdrive short of Kandar, of course. It would have broken out once before, to correct its line and estimate the distance to its destination. It would have a.s.sembled itself at that breakout point, but it would still arrive in a disorderly mob. One's point of arrival could not be too closely figured at the high speeds of overdrive. So when the Mekinese came, they would not be in formation.

Bors called the flagship, when the gas-giant planet was in line and a barrier against the radio waves. King Humphrey's voice came from the speaker by Bors's side.

"_Bors? What?_"

"Majesty," said Bors. "Talents, Incorporated says the enemy fleet will break out of overdrive in just about ten minutes. We're out here waiting for it, instead of aground as they'll expect. They'll break out in complete confusion. Even with great luck, they'll lose time a.s.sembling into combat formation. Being out here, we may be able to hit them before they're organized."

A pause.

"_I've been discussing tactics with the high command_," said the king's voice. "_There's some dispute. The cla.s.sic tactic is to try for englobement._"

"I want to point out, Majesty," Bors interrupted urgently, "that when we cross the north pole again, we're apt to detect the fleet signalling frantically to itself, sorting itself out, trying to get into some sort of order. It'll be stirred up as if with a spoon. But if we come around the planet's pole--and they don't expect us to be out here waiting for them--we'll be in combat-ready formation. We may be able to tear into them as an organized unit before they can begin to co-operate with each other."

A longer pause. Then King Humphrey said grimly;

"_There is one weak point in your proposal, Bors. Only one. It is that Talents, Incorporated may be wrong about the time of breakout. The more I think, the less I believe in what they have done, or even what I saw!

But we'll be prepared, however unlikely your idea. We'll be ready._"

He clicked off. Only minutes later, the combat-alert order came through.

In the next ten minutes, Bors's ship hummed for five, was quiet for three, and then, two minutes early, all inner compartment doors closed quietly and there was that m.u.f.fled stillness which meant that everybody was ready for anything that might happen.

In the control room, Bors watched out of a direct-vision port, giving occasional glances to the screens. There were flecks of light from innumerable stars. Then the shining cloud-bank of the gas-giant planet went black. Screens showed all of the fleet--each blip with a nimbus about it which identified it as a friend, not a foe. There was the blip of the leading ship, the "point" of the formation. There were the flanking ships and all the martial array of the fleet.

Then the screens sparkled with seemingly hundreds of blips which seemed to swirl and spin and whirl again in total and disordered confusion.

Gongs clanged. A voice said, "_Co-o-ntact! Enemy fleet ahead. Wide dispersion. They're milling about like gnats on a sunny day!_"

A curt and authoritative and well-recognized voice snapped, "_All ships keep formation on flagship. Course coordinates...._" The voice gave them. "_There's a clump of enemy ships beginning to organize! We hit them!_"

The fleet of Kandar came around the gas-giant world and flung itself at the fleet of Mekin. It seemed that everything was subject to intolerable delay. For long, sweating, unbearable minutes nothing happened except that the fleet of Kandar went hurtling through s.p.a.ce with no sensation or direct evidence of motion. The gas-giant planet dwindled, but not very fast. The bright specks on the screens which were enemy ships seemed to separate as they drew nearer. But all happened with infinite and infuriating deliberation.

It was worth waiting for. There was truly a clumping of enemy ships ahead. Some of them were less than ten miles apart. In a two-hundred-mile sphere there were forty ships. They'd been moving to consolidate themselves into a mutually a.s.sisting group. What they accomplished was the provision of a fine acc.u.mulation of targets. Before they could organize themselves, the Kandarian fleet swept through them.

It vastly outnumbered them in this area.

It smashed them. Bombs flashed in emptiness. There were gas-clouds and smoke-clouds which stayed behind in s.p.a.ce as the fleet went on.

"_New coordinates_," said the familiar authoritative voice. It gave them. "_There's another enemy condensation. We hit it!_"

The fleet swung in s.p.a.ce. It drove on and on and on. Interminable time pa.s.sed. Then there were flashes brighter than the stars. A Kandar cruiser blew up soundlessly. But far, far away other things detonated, and what had been proud structures of steel and beryllium, armed and manned, became mere incandescent vapor.

A third clumping of Mekinese ships. The Kandarian fleet overwhelmed it; overrode it; used exactly the tactics the Mekinese might have used. It ruthlessly made use of its local, concentrated strength. It was outnumbered in the whole battle area by not less than ten to one. But the Mekinese fleet was scattered. Where it struck, the Kandarian fleet was four and five, and sometimes twenty, ships to one.

It was a smaller fleet in every cla.s.s of ships, but it was compact and controlled and it made slashing plunges through the dispersed and confused enemy. With ordinary missiles three ships could always destroy two, and four could destroy three. But in the battle of the gas-giant planet, where there was fighting the Kandarians were never less than two to one. They were surrounded by enemies, but when those enemies tried to gather together for strength, the ma.s.s of murderously-fighting ships of Kandar swung upon the incipient group and blasted it.

Nearly half the Mekinese fleet was out of action before Bors's ship fired a single missile. He'd sat in the skipper's chair, and from time to time, the course of all the fleet was changed, and he saw that his ship kept its place rigidly in formation. But he had given not one order out of routine before the enemy strength was half gone. Then the communicator said coldly: