He heard the leader of the young men from Deccan speaking humorously. "Your revolt, sir," he told Bors, "is spreading everywhere! On Cela, sir, there are great space-ship yards, where they build craft for the Mekinese navy. Not long ago they finished one and it went out to space for a trial run. It didn't come back. Sabotage. Everybody knew it. The Mekinese raged. A little while later they finished another ship. But the Mekinese were smart! They sent it off for its trial run with only Celans on board. If there were sabotage this time, it wouldn't be Mekinese who died in space! But that ship didn't come back either! It touched down here, sir, three weeks ago, and we supplied it with food and missiles and some of us joined it. It went off to try to find you." "I'd better--go after it," said Bors, dry-throated. "It could blunder into trouble. At best--" The youthful leader of Deccan's revolt grinned widely. "It's got plenty of missiles," he told Bors. "It can take care of itself! And it has plenty of food. We even gave them target-balloons to practice launching missiles on. We've been storing up missiles to lay an ambush for a Mekinese squadron if one comes by. A lot of us joined the ship, though." "In any case," said Bors, with the feel of ashes in his throat, "I'll track it down so it can join the fleet." He could not bring himself to tell these confident and admiring young men that there was no hope and never had been; that the tales of his achievements were only partly true and that they had popped into people's minds because a very fat woman far away indulged in daydreams and fantasies. They wouldn't have understood. If they had, they wouldn't have believed. He found that he savagely resisted the conviction himself. But there was no other way for such garbled tales with such a substratum of fact to be spread among the stars. And whoever spread them knew of events up to the last news sent back by Bors, but nothing after that. Undoubtedly, Talents, Incorporated's Department for Disseminating Truthful Seditious Rumors had been at work on Mekin, but the damage done elsewhere was a thousand times greater than any benefit done there. It was too late to repair the damage, here or anywhere else. This planet and all the rest were too far committed to rebellion ever to be forgiven by Mekin. Mekin would take revenge. It was not pleasant to think about. So the _Horus_ departed, and traveled in high-speed overdrive for ship-days seemingly without end, toward Glamis. It knew nothing that happened outside its own cocoon of overdrive field. It knew nothing of any of the thousands of myriads of stars, whose planetary systems offered unlimited room for humanity to live in freedom and without fear.