He stood by a viewport as the _Sylva_ drove away. The _Isis_ ceased to be a shape and became the most minute of motes. Bors looked at his watch. "Not far enough yet," he said depressedly. "Everything will go." The yacht drove on. Fifteen--twenty minutes at steadily increasing solar-system speed. "It's about due," said Bors. Gwenlyn came and stood beside him. They looked together out at the stars. There were myriads upon myriads of them, of all the colors of the spectrum, of all degrees of brightness, in every possible asymmetric distribution. There was a spark in remoteness. Instantly it was vastly more than a spark. It was a globe of deadly, blue-white incandescence. It flamed brilliantly as all the _Isis's_ fuel and the warheads on all its unexpended missiles turned to pure energy in the hundred-millionth of a second. It was many times brighter than a sun. Then it was not. And the violence of the explosion was such that there was not even glowing metal-vapor where it had been. Every atom of the ship's substance had been volatilized and scattered through so many thousands of cubic miles of emptiness that it did not show even as a mist. "A good ship," said Bors grimly. Then he growled. "I wonder if they saw that on Garen and what they thought about it!" He straightened himself. "How did you know we were in trouble?" "There's a Talent," said Gwenlyn matter-of-factly, "who can always tell how people feel. She doesn't know what they think or why. But she can tell when they're uneasy and so on. Father uses her to tell him when people lie. When what they say doesn't match how they feel, they're lying." "I think," said Bors, "that I'll stay away from her. But that won't do any good, will it?" Gwenlyn smiled at him. It was a very nice smile. "She could tell that things had gone wrong with the ship," she observed, "because of the way you felt. But I've forbidden her ever to tell when someone lies to me or anything like that. I don't want to know people's feelings when they want to hide them." "Fine!" said Bors. "I feel better." Standing so close to Gwenlyn, he also felt light-headed. She smiled at him again, as if she understood. "We'll head for Glamis now," she said. "The situation there should have changed a great deal because of what you've done." "It would be my kind of luck," said Bors half joking, "for it to have changed for the worse." It had. Chapter 9