Starborne

The big woman shrugs. The manic force has gone out of her as suddenly as it came. She has made her little bit of trouble and is ready to relent. She looks tired and defeated, and to the year-captain’s relief she seems as ready to be done with this as the rest of them. The point she has raised is a troublesome one, but, as Heinz has observed, this is not the moment to be discussing it. And in an almost toneless voice Sieglinde says, “Whatever you want, captain. Whatever you want.”

Until now the starship, in the absence of any specific destination, has been following an essentially undirected path through the nospace tube, simply traveling away from Earth rather than toward some particular star. Its course, such as it is, has been chosen to carry it into one of the more densely populated areas of the immediate sector of the celestial sphere in which Earth’s sun is located; but the intent of the planners of the voyage was that the voyagers would at some point redirect the ship toward a star they would choose themselves on the basis of planetary data collected in the course of the journey.

Now that time has arrived. The Wotan must swing its course through nospace toward the star that is the primary of Zed Hesper’s Planet A; and when it has reached the vicinity of that star, it must break itself out of the nospace tube in which it has been traveling and return to the Einsteinian continuum, so that surveillance of Planet A may be carried out by ordinary spacefaring methods, an orbital circuit in a probe ship, direct visual inspection, and then perhaps an actual landing if the survey of surface conditions from nearby is in any way encouraging.

Nospace travel is a fundamentally nonlinear phenomenon. If you propose to make a surface journey between two cities on Earth that are three thousand kilometers apart — Los Angeles and Montreal, let us say — you will expect to cover a distance of three thousand kilometers during the course of the trip, no more, no less, and the elapsed time of the journey will be a function of the average time it takes to coverone kilometer, multiplied by three thousand. There are no shortcuts; there are no exceptions to the rule that one must travel a distance of three thousand kilometers in order to make a journey of three thousand kilometers. Not so in nospace. Linear measurements applicable in the classical continuum have no meaning there. Spatial relationships between points in the universe that have been determined by conventional means are irrelevant in nospace. Nospace is all shortcuts, nothingbut shortcuts. In that special space, flattened and curved and doubled and redoubled upon itself as it is, the logic of linear travel is useless and paradoxes abound. Dimensions are collapsed and transformed; the infinite universe is infinitely adjacent to itself; all normal understanding of such concepts as “near” and “far,” “here” and “there,” “toward” and “away from” must be discarded. In nospace it may be quicker to travel between two stars five hundred light-years apart than between two that are close neighbors. There may — there is at least theoretical basis for the notion — be no clear and consistently calculable relationship between realworld distance between two points and nospace transit time between those points at all.

There are, however, proxies and equivalents. With the aid of appropriate computational power one can plot a set of transformations that will carry one through nospace along quasi-geodetic lines corresponding to actual realspace vectors and allow one actually to reach a preselected destination. At least, so the governing equations of nospace travel demonstrate, and in the brief experimental flights of theColumbus and then theUltima Thule those equations were found to hold true.