Copyright, ©, 1962, by Murray Leinster. All rights reserved. Published by arrangement with the author. Printed in the U.S.A. TALENTS, INCORPORATED Part One...

Young Captain Bors —who impatiently refused to be called anything else—was strangely occupied when the communicator buzzed. He'd ripped away the cord about a thick parcel of documents and heaved them into the fireplace of the office of the Minister for Diplomatic Affairs. A fire burned there, and already there were many ashes. The carpet and the chairs of the cabinet officer's sanctum were coated with fine white dust. As the communicator buzzed again, Captain Bors took a fireplace tool and stirr

At the spaceport , carefully selected persons filed onto the space-liner Vestis . It was not officially believed that the other three great chartered ships would arrive before the Mekinese fleet. It was, in fact, rather likely that none of the information given by Talents, Incorporated was ever believed until the event confirmed the prediction. In the case of the first liner, those who went on board had been chosen by a strict principle of priority. Men who would merely be imprisoned when Mekin

There was a fleet on the way to Kandar. It could not be said to be traveling in space, of course. If there had been an observer somewhere, he could not conceivably have detected the ships. There would be no occultations of stars; no blotting out of any of the hundreds and thousands of millions of bright specks which filled all the firmament. There would be no drive-radiation which even the most sensitive of instruments could pick up. The fleet might be at one place to an observer's right—where i

The small fighting ship lifted swiftly from the surface of Kandar. As it rose, the sky turned dark and the sun's brilliant disk, far too bright to be looked at with unshielded eyes, became a blazing furnace that could roast unshielded flesh. Stars appeared, shining myriads despite the sun, with every one vivid against a background of black. The planet's surface became a half-ball, of which a part lay in darkness. " Co-o-ntact! " said a voice through many speakers placed throughout the fighting s

Nobody had ever found any use for the Glamis solar system. There was a sun of highly irregular variability. There were two planets, of which the one farther out might have been useful for colonization except that it was subject to extreme changes of climate as its undependable sun burned brightly or dimly. The nearer planet was so close to its primary that it had long ceased to rotate. One hemisphere, forever in sunshine, remained in a low, red heat. Its night hemisphere, in perpetual darkness,

The Isis approached Tralee from the night side, and at a time when the planet's spaceport faced the sun. Tralee was not a base for Mekinese war-craft. To the contrary, it was strictly a conquered world. It was desirable for Mekinese ships to be able to appear as if magically and without warning in its skies. There would be no far-ranging radars on the planet except at its solitary spaceport. Mekinese ships could come out of overdrive, time a solar-system-drive approach to arrive at Tralee's atmo

The Mekinese ship was a cruiser, and it broke out of overdrive within the Tralee solar system just two days, four hours, and some odd minutes after Gwenlyn predicted its coming. Presumably, it had made the customary earlier breakout to correct its course and measure the distance remaining to be run. In overdrive there was not as yet a way to know accurately one's actual speed, and at astronomical distances small errors piled up. Correction of line was important, too, because a course that was ev

The trick , of course, was in the timing, and the secret was that Bors knew what he was doing, while those who opposed him did not. Bors had declared himself a pirate on Tralee, and here off Garen he'd claimed the same status. But no Mekinese, as yet, knew why he'd outlawed himself, nor his purpose in challenging a line battleship to fight. It seemed like the raving, hysterical hatred of men with no motive but hate. But it wasn't. The Isis could have sent down a missile with a limited-yield warh

" The decision ," said King Humphrey the Eighth, stubbornly, "is exactly what I have said. In full war council it has been agreed that the fleet, through a new use of missiles, is a stronger fighting force than ever before. This was evidenced in the late battle and no one questions it. But it is also agreed that we remain hopelessly outnumbered. We are in a position where we simply cannot fight! For us to have fought would probably have been forgiven if we had been wiped out in the recent battle

The Mekinese did not display a sporting spirit. There were four heavy cruisers and eleven lighter ships of the Horus's size and armament. According to current theories of space-battle tactics, two of the light cruisers should have disposed of the Horus with ease and dispatch. It might have seemed sportsmanlike and certainly sufficient to give the Horus only two antagonists at a time, which would have been calculated to provide odds of six hundred to one against it. Two light cruisers would have

The news as Bors got it from the men of Deccan was remarkable for two reasons: that so much of it was true, and that all of it was glamorized and romanticized and garbled. It was astonishing to find any relation at all between such fabulously romantic tales and the facts, because there was no way for news to travel between solar systems except on ships, and no ships had carried stories like these! Here on Deccan, the shining-eyed young men knew that Bors had landed on Tralee and on Garen. They k

Bors got nowhere , of course. His proposal had all the ear-marks of lunacy of purest ray serene. He proposed urgently to equip all the ships of the fleet with the low-power overdrive fields. It could be done in days. Instructions were already distributed and would have been studied and understood. The fleet would then go to Kandar—if it appeared that the Mekinese grand fleet would go there—and set up a dummy fleet of target-globes in war array. This would be a fleet, but not of fighting ships. I