But though ships in overdrive had to be considered as in motion, and
though their speed had to be considered as beyond the astronomical,
there were such incredible distances to be covered that time piled up.
Aside from double stars, there were no suns yet discovered which were
less than light-years apart. The time required for travel between
inhabited planets was still comparable to the time needed for
surface-travel between continents on a world. So the fleet of Mekin,
journeying faster than the mind could imagine, nevertheless drove and
drove and drove in the blackness and darkness and isolation of each
ship's overdrive field. They had so driven for days. They would continue
to do so for days to come.
When Captain Bors burned the documents in the Ministry for Diplomatic
Affairs, the enemy fleet might have been said to be at one place. When a
submerged space-cruiser, planning assassination, was itself blown to
bits with no chance to strike back, the Mekinese fleet was approximately
somewhere else. When a cabinet meeting disheartened King Humphrey, the
fleet was much nearer to Kandar. But days of highly-tedious
eventlessness were still ahead of the war-fleet.
So Bors and Gwenlyn and Morgan got a ground-car and were driven to
Kandar's commercial spaceport. There they found the _Sylva_. It was far
larger than the usual space-yachts. There were commercial space-craft
which were no larger. But it was a workmanlike sort of ship, at that. It
had two lifeboat blisters, and there were emergency rockets for landings
where no landing-grids existed. The armored bands of overdrive-coil
shielding were massive. The _Sylva_, in fact, looked more like a service
ship than either a commercial vessel or a yacht. It was obviously
unarmed, but it had the look of a craft that could go very nearly
anywhere.
"You'll find the Talents a bit odd," said Gwenlyn, as they drove up
under the hull's wide bulge. "When they meet new people they like to
show off. Most of them were pretty well frustrated before Father found a
use for them. But they're quite pleasant people if you don't treat them
like freaks. They're not, you know."
Bors had nothing to say. Until he was fifteen he'd lived on Tralee,
which was then a quiet, pacific world, as Kandar had been. As the nephew
of a monarch at least as resolutely constitutional as King Humphrey,
he'd been raised in a very matter-of-fact fashion. The atmosphere had
been that of a comfortable, realistic adjustment to facts. He was taught
a great respect for certain facts without being made fanatically opposed
to anything else. He'd been trained to require reasonable evidence
without demanding that all proofs come out of test tubes and electronic
apparatus. He was specifically taught that arithmetic cannot be proved
by experimental evidence, but that sound experimental evidence agrees
with arithmetic. So he was probably better qualified than most to deal
with something like Talents, Incorporated. But it was not easy for him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account