egree colder.
There was a magnetic storm in the photosphere of a sun which was not
supposed to have such things.

The war-fleet of Kandar, in very fine formation, flowed in its polar
orbit around the fourth planet out from Kandar's sun. In carefully
scrambled and re-scrambled communications, certain ships were authorized
to modify the settings of Mark 13 missiles in this exact fashion, to
remove their warheads, and to diverge in pairs from the fleet proper.
They were to familiarize themselves with the results of making the
acceleration of such missiles variable during flight. They would use the
supplied data-tables to compute firing constants for given ranges and
relative speeds. They would, of course, return to formation to permit
other ships the same practice with the new method of missile handling.

Bors read the letter from Talents, Incorporated. It gave an exact time
for the breakout of the Mekinese fleet. The rest consisted mostly of
specific warnings from the Talents, Incorporated Department for
Predicting Dirty Tricks. It listed certain things to be looked for among
the ships of the fleet. The information was like the news of an enemy
ship aground on Kandar; it was self-evidently plausible once one thought
of it. Mekin was ruled and its military practices governed by men with
the instincts of conspirators, using other men with the
psychopathological impulses which make for spies. They thought of
devices neither statesmen nor fighting men would have invented. But a
paranoid Talent could think of them, and know that they were true.

As a result of the warnings, the flagship was found to have been somehow
equipped, by Mekin, with a tiny, special microwave transmitter which
used a frequency not usual on Kandar. It was, in effect, a radio beacon
on which enemy missiles could home. Also, the lead ship of a
cruiser-squadron had been mysteriously geared to reveal its exact
position, course and speed while in space. There were other concealed
devices. Some would make the controls of predetermined ships useless
when beams of specific frequency and form were trained upon them.

Once the basic idea was discovered, it was possible to make sure that
all such enemy-supplied equipment was out of operation. The fleet was
still in no promising situation, with a ten-to-one disadvantage. But it
could not have put up even the beginning of a fight, had these
spy-installed devices remained undiscovered.

Bors said carefully, by s