When Bors had examined the damage, and the emergency-purifiers had taken the smoke and smell out of the air, his second-in-command looked suicidally gloomy.
"It's bad business," said Bors wryly. "Very bad business! But I should have mentioned it to you. I didn't think of it. I wouldn't have thought of it if I'd been doing the overdrive business myself."
The second-in-command said bitterly;
"But I knew you'd tried the new low-power overdrive! I knew it!"
"I left it switched in," said Bors, "because I thought we might use it in the fight with the battleship. But we didn't."
"I should have checked that it was off!" protested his second. "It's my fault!"
Bors shrugged. Deciding whose fault it was wouldn't repair the damage. There'd been a human error. Bors had approached Garen on the low-power overdrive that Logan had computed for him. There was a special switch to cut it in, instead of the standard overdrive. It should have been cut out when the standard overdrive was used. But somebody in the engine-room had simply thrown the main-drive switch when preparations for overdrive travel began. When the ship should have gone into overdrive, it didn't. The two parallel circuits amounted to an effective short-circuit. Generators, condensers—even the overdrive field coils in their armored mounts outside the hull—everything blew.
So the Isis was left with a solar-system drive and rockets and nothing else. If the drive used only in solar systems were put on full, and the Isis headed for Glamis, and if the food and water held out, it would arrive at that distant world in eighty-some years. It could reach Tralee in fifty. But there were emergency rations for a few weeks only. It was not conceivable that repairs could be made. This was no occasion calling for remarkable ingenuity to make some sort of jury-rigged drive. This was final.
"I've got to think," said Bors heavily.
He went to his own cabin.