Talents, Incorporated Part 15

"If you use these figures," said Logan complacently--and he scribbled figures swiftly--"you'll get it really accurate."

Having finished writing the equation, he wrote the solution. Bors asked suspicious questions. Logan answered absently. He knew nothing about overdrive. He didn't understand anything but numbers and he didn't know how he did what he did with them. But he'd worked backward from observed errors in calculation and found a way to keep them out of the answer.

And he'd done it all in his head. It was unbelievable--yet Bors believed.

"I'll try your figures," he said. "Thanks."

Logan went proudly away, past an orderly bringing cups of coffee to the control room. Bors aimed the s.h.i.+p according to the calculation Logan had given him, scrupulously setting the breakout timer to the exact figure listed.

He was still uncomfortable about the destruction of the Mekinese cruiser when he said curtly, "Overdrive coming!" He'd have preferred a more sportsmanlike type of warfare. He faced the old, deplorable fact that fighting men had had to adjust to throughout the ages; one can fight an honorable enemy honorably, but against some men scruples count as handicaps.

"Swine!" growled Bors. "They'll make us like them!" Then into the microphone he said, "Five, four, three, two, one...."

He pressed the overdrive b.u.t.ton. The sensation of going into overdrive was acutely uncomfortable, as always. Bors swallowed squeamishly and took his cup of coffee.

The _Isis_, then, lay wrapped in a coc.o.o.n of stressed s.p.a.ce. Its properties included the fact that its particular type of stress could travel much more swiftly than the stresses involved in the propagation of radiation, of magnetism, or gravity. And this state of stress--this overdrive field--did not have a position. It _was_ a position. The s.h.i.+p inside it could not be said to be in the real cosmos at all, but when the field collapsed it would be somewhere, and the way it pointed, and how long before collapse, determined in what particular somewhere it would be when it came out. But travel in overdrive was tedious.

As civilization increases man's control of the cosmos, it takes the fun out of it. In prehistoric days a man who had to hunt animals or go hungry may often have gone hungry, but he was never bored by the sameness of his meals. A man who traveled on horseback often got to his destination late, but he was not troubled with ennui on the way. In overdrive, Bors's s.h.i.+p traveled almost with the speed of thought, but there was absolutely nothing to think about while journeying. Not about the journey, anyhow.

While the s.h.i.+p drove on, however, the cargo-s.h.i.+p seized on Tralee made its way toward Glamis and a meeting with the fleet, then gloomily sweeping in orbit around Glamis Two. The food it carried would raise men's spirits a little, but it would not solve the problem of what the fleet was to do. Morgan, on the flags.h.i.+p, expounded the ability of his Talents to perform the incredible, but n.o.body could find any application of the incredible to the fix the fleet was in. On Kandar, the population knew that there had been a battle off the gas-giant planet, but they did not know the result. The Mekinese fleet had not come. The fleet of Kandar had not returned. The caretaker government met in council and desperately made guesses. It arrived at no hopeful conclusion whatever.

The most probable--because most hopeless--conviction seemed to be that the fleet of Mekin had been met and fought, but that it was victorious, and in retaliation for resistance it had gone away to send back swarms of grisly bomb-carriers which would drop atomic bombs in such quant.i.ty that for a thousand years to come there would be no life on Kandar.

The light cruiser, the _Isis_, was unaware of these frustrations. It remained in overdrive, where absolutely nothing happened.

Bors reviewed his actions and could not but approve of them tepidly.

He'd sent food to the fleet, he'd destroyed two enemy fighting s.h.i.+ps and he'd done what he could to harm the Mekinese puppets on Tralee. He'd had them publicly humiliated with well-chosen epithets. He'd destroyed the records and archives of the secret political police.... Many people on Tralee already blessed him, without knowing who he was. There might yet be hope of better days.

But all things end, even journeys at excessively great multiples of the speed of light. The overdrive timer rang warning bells. Taped breakout notifications sounded from speakers throughout the s.h.i.+p. There was a count-down of seconds, and the abominably unpleasant sensation of breakout, and the s.h.i.+p was in normal s.p.a.ce again.

There was the sun of Garen, burning peacefully in a vast void with millions of minute, unwinking lights in the firmament all about it.

There was a gas-giant planet, a mere fifteen million miles away. Further out there were the smaller, frozen worlds. Nearer the sun, on the far side of its...o...b..t, there was the planet Garen.

The _Isis_ drove for that planet, while Bors tried to decide whether the remarkable accuracy of this breakout was due to accident or to Logan's computations.

Logan appeared as Bors was gloomily contemplating the days needed to reach Garen on solar system drive, because overdrive was too fast. Logan looked offhand and elaborately casual, but he fairly glowed with triumph.

"I found out the fact behind the b.u.g.g.e.r factor, Captain," he said condescendingly. "The speed of a s.h.i.+p in overdrive varies as the change in ma.s.s to the minus fourth. Your computers couldn't tell that! Here's a table for calculating the speed of a s.h.i.+p in overdrive according to its ma.s.s and the strength of the overdrive field."

"Fine," said Bors without enthusiasm.

"And to go with it," said Logan, his voice indifferent, but his eyes s.h.i.+ning proudly, "just for my own amus.e.m.e.nt, I computed a complete table of overdrive speeds for this particular s.h.i.+p, with different strengths of field. They run from one point five light-speeds up to the maximum your equipment will give. You have to correct for changes of ma.s.s, of course."

Bors was not quite capable of enthusiasm over the computation of tables of complex figures. He simply could not share Logan's thrill of achievement in the results of the neat rows of numerals. Nor had he struggled unduly to grasp the implication of Logan's explanation.

Instead, he said politely, "Very nice. Thank you very much."

Logan's eyes ceased to s.h.i.+ne. His wounded pride made him defiant.

"n.o.body else anywhere could have worked out that table!" he said stridently. "n.o.body! Morgan said you'd appreciate my work! He said you needed my talent! But what good do you see in it? You think I'm a freak!"

Bors realized that he'd been tactless. Logan's experiences before Talents, Incorporated had made him unduly sensitive. He'd done something of which he was proud, but Bors didn't appreciate its magnitude. Logan reacted to the frustration of his vanity.

"Hold it!" said Bors. "I'm not unappreciative. I'm stupid and worried about something. You just figured an overdrive jump for me that's the most accurate I ever heard of! But I'm desperate for time and we've got to spend two days in solar-system drive because we can't make an overdrive hop of less than light-days! So we're losing forty-eight hours or more."

Logan said as stridently as before:

"But I just showed you you don't have to! Cut the field-strength according to that table."

Bors was jolted. It was suddenly self-evident. Logan had said he'd figured a table of overdrive fields for the _Isis_ which would work for anything between one point five light-speeds to maximum. One point five light-speeds!

It was one of those absurdities in technology that so often go so long before they are noticed. During the development of overdrive, it had been the effort of every technician to get the fastest possible drive.

It was known that with a given ma.s.s and a given field-strength, one could get an effective speed of an unbelievable figure. Men had spent their lives trying to increase that figure. But n.o.body'd ever tried to find out how _slowly_ one could travel in overdrive, because solar-system drive took care of _short_ distances!

"Wait a minute!" said Bors, staring. "Do you really mean I can drive this s.h.i.+p under two light-speeds in overdrive?"

"Look at the table!" said Logan, trembling with anger. "Look at it!

You'll find the figures right there!"

Bors looked. Then he stood up quickly. He left the s.h.i.+p in the care of his second-in-command and plunged into a highly technical discussion with its engineers.

He ran into violent objections. The whole purpose of overdrive was high speed between stars. The engineers insisted that one had to use the strongest possible field. If the field were made feeble, it would become unstable. Everybody knew that the field had to be of maximum strength.

"We'll try minimum," said Bors coldly. "Now let's get to work!"

He had to do much of the labor himself, because the engineers found it necessary to stop at each stage of the effort to explain why it should not be done. He had almost to battle to get an auxiliary circuit paralleling the main overdrive unit, with a transformer to bring down voltage, and a complete new power-supply unit to be cut into the overdrive line while leaving the standard ready for use without delay.

He went back to the control room. He took a distance-reading on the huge planet off to port. He threw on the new, low-power overdrive field. He held it for seconds and broke out. It was still in sight.

The speed of the _Isis_, with the adjusted overdrive, was one point seven lights.

Now, instead of spending days in solar-system drive for planetary approach, Bors went into the new-speed drive and broke out in eleven minutes twenty seconds, and was within a hundred thousand miles of Garen. He'd saved two days and secured the promise of many more such valuable feats.

As soon as the _Isis_ broke to normal s.p.a.ce near Garen, there was a call on the communicator. A familiar voice;

"_Calling_ Isis! _Calling_ Isis! Sylva _calling_ Isis!"

Bors said softly, "d.a.m.nation! For the second time, what are you doing in this place?"

Gwenlyn's voice laughed.

"_Traveling for pleasure, Captain Bors! I've news for you. We were allowed to land and then told to leave again. There's a wars.h.i.+p down below. I told you about it before. It's still there. There's a huge cargo-s.h.i.+p, too, and there are riots because it's almost finished loading with requisitioned foodstuffs for Mekin. Mekin is--would you believe it?--unpopular on Garen!_"

"Very well," said Bors. "I'll see what can be done. Will you carry a message for me?"

"_Happy to oblige, Captain!_"

"Tell them that--" Then Bors stopped short. It was not probable that the fleet wave-form and frequency were known to Mekinese s.h.i.+ps. But the possibility of low-speed overdrive travel was much too important a military secret to risk under any circ.u.mstances. He said, "I'll be along very shortly with some highly encouraging news."

"_Who do I tell this to?_"