For seven successive ship-days there was no event whatever on the _Horus_, as she drove toward Mekin. Undoubtedly the one survivor of the enemy squadron was fleeing for Mekin, too, to report to the highest possible authority what it had seen and experienced. It would not be much, if at all, slower than the _Horus_. It might be faster, and might reach the solar system of Mekin before the _Horus_ broke out there. It had every advantage but one. It had solar-system drive, for use within a planetary group, and it had overdrive for use between the stars. But the _Horus_ had an intermediate drive as well, which was faster than the enemy's slow speed and slower than the fast. Bors depended on it for the continued existence of Kandar and the fleet. As the desperately tedious ship-days went by he began to have ideas--at which he consciously scoffed--concerning Tralee. But if anything as absurd as those ideas came to be, there were a score of other planets which would have to be considered too. He sketched out in his own mind a course of action that would be possible to follow after breakout off Mekin. It did not follow the rules for sound planning, which always assume that if things can go wrong they will. Bors could only plan for what might be done if things went right. But he could not hope. Not really. Still, he considered every possibility, however far-fetched. He came to first-breakout, a light-week short of Mekin. The yellow sun flamed dead ahead. He determined his distance from it with very great care. The _Horus_ went back into overdrive and out again, and it was well within the system, though carefully not on the plane of its ecliptic. Then the _Horus_ waited. She was twenty millions of miles from the planet Mekin. Bors ordered that for intervals of up to five minutes no electronic apparatus on the ship should be in operation. In those periods of electronic silence, his radars swept all of space except Mekin. He had no desire to have Mekin pick up radar-pulses and wonder what they came from. The rest of the system, though, he mapped. He found two meteor-streams, and a clump of three planetoids in a nearly circular orbit, and he spotted a ship just lifted from Mekin by its landing-grid. It went out to five planetary diameters and flicked out of existence so far as radar was concerned. It had gone into overdrive and away. Another ship came around Mekin, in orbit. It reached the spot from which the first ship had vanished. It began to descend; the landing-grid had locked onto it with projected force-fields and was drawing it down to ground. Bors growled to himself. It was not likely that this ship was the one he'd pursued, sight unseen, since the end of the fight off Meriden. But it was a possibility. If it were true, then everything that mattered to Bors was lost forever. Then a blip appeared. It was at the most extreme limit of the radar's range. A ship had come out of overdrive near the fourth planetary orbit of this solar system.