"I've no idea," said Morgan placidly. "Such things have to work themselves out, with a little prodding, of course. But one of my Talents says the lightning-calculator Talent is the one who'll do you the most good soonest. I'd suggest--"
There was a murmur of voices from the cabinet room. The door opened and King Humphrey came out. He looked baffled, which was not unusual. But he looked enraged, which was.
"Bors!" he said thickly. "I've always thought I was a practical man! But if being practical means what some members of my cabinet think, I would rather be a poet! Bors, do something before my cabinet dethrones me and tricks the fleet into disbanding!"
He stumbled across the room, not noticing Morgan or Gwenlyn. Bors came to attention.
"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!"
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.