"Look at the table!" said Logan, trembling with anger. "Look at it! You'll find the figures right there!"
Bors looked. Then he stood up quickly. He left the ship in the care of his second-in-command and plunged into a highly technical discussion with its engineers.
He ran into violent objections. The whole purpose of overdrive was high speed between stars. The engineers insisted that one had to use the strongest possible field. If the field were made feeble, it would become unstable. Everybody knew that the field had to be of maximum strength.
"We'll try minimum," said Bors coldly. "Now let's get to work!"
He had to do much of the labor himself, because the engineers found it necessary to stop at each stage of the effort to explain why it should not be done. He had almost to battle to get an auxiliary circuit paralleling the main overdrive unit, with a transformer to bring down voltage, and a complete new power-supply unit to be cut into the overdrive line while leaving the standard ready for use without delay.
He went back to the control room. He took a distance-reading on the huge planet off to port. He threw on the new, low-power overdrive field. He held it for seconds and broke out. It was still in sight.
The speed of the Isis, with the adjusted overdrive, was one point seven lights.
Now, instead of spending days in solar-system drive for planetary approach, Bors went into the new-speed drive and broke out in eleven minutes twenty seconds, and was within a hundred thousand miles of Garen. He'd saved two days and secured the promise of many more such valuable feats.
As soon as the Isis broke to normal space near Garen, there was a call on the communicator. A familiar voice;
"Calling Isis! Calling Isis! Sylva calling Isis!"