"Majesty," he said, not knowing whether he spoke in irony or bewilderment, "I take that as an order."
The king did not answer. When the door on the other side of the room closed behind his unregal figure, Bors turned to Morgan.
"I think I've been given authority," he said in a sort of baffled calm. "Suppose we go, Mr. Morgan, and find out what your lightning calculator can do in the way of mental arithmetic, to change the situation of the kingdom?"
"Fine!" said Morgan cheerfully. "D'you know, Captain Bors, he can solve a three-body problem in his head? He hasn't the least idea how he does it, but the answer always comes out right!" Then he said exuberantly, "He'll tell you something useful, though! That's Talents, Incorporated information!"
Chapter 3
There was a fleet on the way to Kandar. It could not be said to be traveling in space, of course. If there had been an observer somewhere, he could not conceivably have detected the ships. There would be no occultations of stars; no blotting out of any of the hundreds and thousands of millions of bright specks which filled all the firmament. There would be no drive-radiation which even the most sensitive of instruments could pick up. The fleet might be at one place to an observer's right—where it was imperceptible—and then it might be at a place to the observer's left—where it was undetectable—and nobody could have told the difference.
Actually, each ship of the Mekinese fleet was in overdrive, which meant that each had stressed the space immediately around it so that it was like a cocoon of other-space; as if it were out of this cosmos altogether and in another. In sober fact, of course, nothing of the sort had happened. An overdrive field changed the physical constants of space. The capacity of a condenser in an overdrive field was different from that of a condenser out of it. The self-induction of a coil in an overdrive field was not the same as in normal space. Magnetic and gravitational fields also did not follow the same laws in stressed space as in unstressed extension. The speed of light was different. Inertia was different. In short, a ship could drive at many hundreds of times the velocity of light and the laws of Einstein did not apply, because his laws referred to space that men had not tampered with.
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.