For a long time nothing happened. The _Isis_ drove to meet the cruiser. The two vessels should be approaching each other at a rate which was the total of their speeds. Bors punched computer-keys and got the gravitational factor at this distance from Tralee's sun. He set the _Isis's_ solar-system drive to that exact quantity. He waited. His own radar was now non-operative. Its first discovery-pulse would have been observed by the Mekinese duty-officer. The fact that it did not repeat would be abnormal. The duty-officer would wonder why it didn't come again. The astrogation-radar cut off. Then a single strong pulse came. It would be a ranging-pulse. Cargo-ship radars sacrificed high accuracy for wide and deep coverage. But war-vessels carried pulse instruments which could measure distances within feet up to thousands of miles, and by phase-scrambling among the echoes even get some information about the size and shape of the object examined. Not much, but some. Bors relaxed. Things were going well. When four other ranging-pulses arrived at second intervals, he nodded to himself. This was a warship's reaction. It could be nothing else. That officer knew that something was coming out from Tralee. It was on approximately a collision course. But a ship traveling under power should gain velocity as long as its drive was on. When traveling outward from the sun and not under power, it should lose velocity by so many feet per second to the sun's gravitational pull. Bors's ship did neither. It displayed the remarkably unlikely characteristic of absolutely steady motion. It was not normal. It was not possible. It could not have any reasonable explanation, in the mind of a Mekinese. Which was its purpose. It would arouse professional curiosity on the cruiser, which would then waste some precious time attempting to identify it. There wouldn't be suspicion because it didn't act suspiciously. Still, it couldn't be dismissed, because it didn't behave in any recognizable fashion. The cruiser would want to know more about it; it shouldn't move at a steady velocity going outward from a sun. In consequence, Bors got in the first shot. He said, "Fire one!" when the Mekinese would be just about planning to turn their electron-telescope upon it. A missile leaped away from the _Isis_. It went off at an angle, and it curved madly, and the instrumentation of the cruiser could spot it as now there, now here, now nearer, and now nearer still. But the computers could not handle an object which not only changed velocity but changed the rate at which its velocity changed. Missiles came pouring out of the Mekinese ship. They were infinitesimal, bright specks on the radar-screen. They curved violently in flight trying to intercept the _Isis's_ missile. They failed.