Instead, he said politely, "Very nice. Thank you very much."
Logan's eyes ceased to shine. His wounded pride made him defiant.
"Nobody else anywhere could have worked out that table!" he said stridently. "Nobody! Morgan said you'd appreciate my work! He said you needed my talent! But what good do you see in it? You think I'm a freak!"
Bors realized that he'd been tactless. Logan's experiences before Talents, Incorporated had made him unduly sensitive. He'd done something of which he was proud, but Bors didn't appreciate its magnitude. Logan reacted to the frustration of his vanity.
"Hold it!" said Bors. "I'm not unappreciative. I'm stupid and worried about something. You just figured an overdrive jump for me that's the most accurate I ever heard of! But I'm desperate for time and we've got to spend two days in solar-system drive because we can't make an overdrive hop of less than light-days! So we're losing forty-eight hours or more."
Logan said as stridently as before:
"But I just showed you you don't have to! Cut the field-strength according to that table."
Bors was jolted. It was suddenly self-evident. Logan had said he'd figured a table of overdrive fields for the Isis which would work for anything between one point five light-speeds to maximum. One point five light-speeds!
It was one of those absurdities in technology that so often go so long before they are noticed. During the development of overdrive, it had been the effort of every technician to get the fastest possible drive. It was known that with a given mass and a given field-strength, one could get an effective speed of an unbelievable figure. Men had spent their lives trying to increase that figure. But nobody'd ever tried to find out how slowly one could travel in overdrive, because solar-system drive took care of short distances!
"Wait a minute!" said Bors, staring. "Do you really mean I can drive this ship under two light-speeds in overdrive?"