Titans of Chaos

Colin looked to the stern. "If this works, that will be the floor, right? We'll be stuck at the bottomof a wooden well, which is six feet in radius, for two days with no bathroom... 'scuse me, Leader,no head. Where are you and Vanity going to take showers? I want to watch you scrub each other'sbacks with sudsy soap in zero-g."

I said, "Maybe we can take a shortcut and be there in a few minutes!"

Vanity closed her eyes and asked her boat for a path to the planet Mars. Nothing of any particularimport happened. She opened her eyes and said, "I cannot find a secret passage through a wall ifthere is no wall. It's all empty nothingness up here. Also, I think my power is at least a bit likeyours: a place someone has looked before is already 'fixed.' You know what I mean? It's taken,established, claimed. I can convince the world there might be a shortcut in some place no one hasever looked before; I cannot do that in a night sky the whole planet of astronomers look at everyday, er, night. Unless you can bend the fourth dimension for me, Amelia?"

Which I could not think of how to do just at that moment. Her ship was much bigger in the fourthdimension than in three, and I could not see how I could move the vessel at all, as it was attachedto a complex and huge structure of space-warps and energy-obligations. I could throw things pastthe walls, but I could not move the ship herself. As far as my race was concerned, the ship wasanchored in one spot. I could make the ship heavier or lighter, but I could not add momentum toher. Go figure.

I tried to tell Vanity how big her ship was, but she covered her ears and warned me not to look atthe ship too closely, or else I would kill off any chance of finding other secret doors in the hull.

So I said, "We have to go through outer space, just like any other astronauts, then."

Quentin shook his head. "Which might prove impossible, Leader. Are X-rays and gamma rays andcosmic rays from the sun sterilizing us right now?"

It was not impossible, but we spent longer getting the vessel ready for the trip than the trip itselftook.

The Huntress did not overtake us. We took up a middle-distance orbit about one thousand milesabove the Earth and set to work.