[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Astounding Science-Fiction, June 1943.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The chart in the terminal building at Canalopsis Spaceport, Mars,
was a huge thing that was the focus of all eyes. It occupied a
thirty-by-thirty space in the center of one wall, and it had a
far-flung iron railing about it to keep the people from crowding it
too close, thus shutting off the view. It was a popular display, for
it helped to drive home the fact that space travel was different from
anything else. People were aware that their lives had been built upon
going from one fixed place to another place, equally immobile. But in
Interplanet travel one left a moving planet for another planet, moving
at a different velocity. You found that the shortest distance was not a
straight line but a space curve involving higher mathematics.
The courses being traveled at the time were marked, and those that
would be traversed in the very near future were drawn upon the chart,
too, all appropriately labeled. At a glance, one could see that in
fifty minutes and seventeen seconds, the _Empress of Kolain_ would take
off from Mars, which was the red disk on the right; and she would
travel along the curve so marked to Venus, which was almost one hundred
and sixty degrees clockwise around the Sun. People were glad of the
chance to go on this trip because the famous Relay Station would come
within a telescope's sight on the way.
The _Empress of Kolain_ would slide into Venus on the day side and a
few hours later she would lift again to head for Terra, a few degrees
ahead of Venus and about thirty million miles away.
Precisely on the zero-zero, the _Empress of Kolain_ lifted upward on
four tenuous pillars of dull-red glow and drove a hole in the sky. The
glow was almost lost in the bright sunshine, and soon it died. The
_Empress of Kolain_ was a little world in itself, and would so remain
until it dropped onto the ground at Venus, almost two hundred million
miles away.
Driving upward, the _Empress of Kolain_ could not have been out of the
thin Martian atmosphere when a warning bell rang in the telephone and
telespace office at the terminal. The bell caught official ears, and
all work was stopped as the personnel of the communications office
ran to the machine to see what was so important that the "immediate
attention" signal was rung.
Impatiently the operator waited for the tape to come clicking from the
machine. It came, letter by letter, click by click, at fifty words per
minute. The operator tore the strip from the machine and read aloud:
"Hold _Empress of Kolain_. Reroute to Terra direct. Will be quarantined
at Venus. Whole planet in epidemic of Venusian Fever."
"Snap answer," growled Keg Johnson. "Tell 'em: 'Too little and too
late. _Empress of Kolain_ left thirty seconds before warning bell. What
do we do now?'"
The operator's fingers clicked madly over the keyboard. Across space
went the reply, across the void to the Relay Station. It ran through
the Station's mechanism and went darting to Terra. It clicked out as
sent in the offices of Interplanet Transport. A vice president read the
message and swore roundly. He swore in three Terran languages, in the
language of the Venusians, and even managed to visualize a few choice
remarks from the Martian Pictographs that were engraved on the Temples
of Canalopsis.
"Miss Deane," he yelled at the top of his voice. "Take a message! Shoot
a line to Channing on Venus Equilateral. Tell him: '_Empress of Kolain_
on way to Venus. Must be contacted and rerouted to Terra direct. Has
million dollars' worth of Martian Line Moss aboard; will perish under
quarantine. Spare no expense.' Sign that 'Williams, Interplanet.'"
"Yes, Mr. Williams," said the secretary. "Right away."
More minutes of light-fast communication. Out of Terra to Luna,
across space to Venus Equilateral Relay Station, the nerve center of
Interplanetary Communications. The machines clicked and tape cleared
from the slot. It was pasted neatly on a sheet of official paper,
stamped _rush_ and put in a pneumatic tube.
As Don Channing began to read the message, Keg Johnson on Mars was
chewing worriedly on his fourth fingernail, and Vice President Williams
was working on his second. But Johnson had a head start and therefore
would finish first. Both men knew that nothing more could be done. If
Channing couldn't do it, nobody could.
Channing finished the 'gram and swore. It was a good-natured swear
word, far from downright vilification, though it did consign certain
items to the Nether Regions. He punched a button with some relish,
and a rather good-looking woman entered. She smiled at him with more
intimacy than a secretary should, and sat down.
"Arden, call Walt in, will you?"
Arden Wastphal smiled. "You might have done that yourself," she told
him. She reached for the call button with her left hand, and the
diamond on her fourth finger glinted like a pilot light.
"I know it," he answered, "but that wouldn't give me a chance to see
you."
"Baloney," said Arden. "You just wait until next October. I'll be in
your hair all the time then."
"By then I may be tired of you," said Channing with a smile. "But until
then, take it or leave it." His face grew serious, and he tossed the
message across the table to her. "What do you think of that?"
Arden read, and then remarked: "That's a huge order, Don. Think you can
do it?"
"It'll cost plenty. I don't know whether we can contact a ship in
space. It hasn't been done to date, you know, except for short
distances."
* * * * *
The door opened without a knock and Walt Franks entered. "Billing and
cooing?" he asked. "Why do you two need an audience?"
"We don't," answered Don. "This was business."
"For want of evidence, I'll believe that. What's the dope?"
"Walt, what are the chances of hooking up with the _Empress of Kolain_,
which is en route from Mars to Venus?"
"About equal to a celluloid snowball--you know where," said Franks,
looking slyly at Arden.
"Take off your coat, Walt. We've got a job."
"You mean--Hey! Remind me to quit Saturday."
"This is dead in earnest, Walt." Don told the electronics engineer all
he knew.
"Boy, this is a job that I wouldn't want my life to depend on. In the
first place, we can't beam a transmitter at them if we can't see 'em.
And in the second place, if we did, they couldn't receive us."
"We can get a good idea of where they are and how they're going," said
Channing. "That is common knowledge."
"Astronomy is an exact science," chanted Franks. "But by the time we
figure out just where the _Empress of Kolain_ is with respect to us at
any given instant we'll all be old men with gray beards. She's crossing
toward us on a skew curve--and we'll have to beam it past Sol. It won't
be easy, Don. And then if we do find them, what do we do about it?"
"Let's find them first and then work out a means of contacting them
afterward."
"Don," interrupted Arden, "what's so difficult?"
Franks fell backward into a chair. Don turned to the girl and asked:
"Are you kidding?"
"No. I'm just ignorant. What is so hard about it. We shoot beams
across a couple of hundred million miles like nothing and maintain
communications at any cost. What should be so hard about contacting a
ship?"
"In the first place, we can see a planet, and they can see us, so they
can hold their beams. A spaceship might be able to see us, but they
couldn't hold a beam on us because of the side sway. We couldn't see
them until they are right upon us and so we could not hope to hold
a beam on them. Spaceships _might_ broadcast, but you have no idea
what the square law of radiated power will do to a broadcast signal
when millions upon millions of miles are counted in. A half million
watts on any planet will not quite cover the planet as a service
area on broadcast frequencies. On short waves it will because of the
skip distance. But for square-law dissipation, you can't count skip
distances--and in space it would be a case of the signal losing in
strength according to the inverse square of the distance. So they don't
try it. A spaceship may as well be on Rigel as far as contacting her in
space goes.
"We might beam a wide-dispersion affair at them," continued Channing.
"But it would be pretty thin by the time it got there. And, having no
equipment, they couldn't hear us."
"May we amend that?" asked Franks. "They are equipped with radio. But
the things are used only in landing operations where the distance is
measured in miles, not Astronomical Units."
"O.K.," smiled Channing. "It's turned off during flight and we may
consider the equipment as being nonexistent."
"And, according to the chart, we've got to contact them before the
turn-about," offered Arden. "They must have time to deflect their
course to Terra."
"You think of the nicest complications," said Channing. "I was just
about to hope that we could flash them or grab at 'em with a skeeter.
But we can't wait until they pass us."
"That will be the last hope," admitted Franks. "But say! Did any bright
soul think of shooting a fast ship after them from Canalopsis?"
"Sure. The answer is the same as Simple Simon's answer to the Pieman:
Alas, they haven't any!"
"No use asking why," growled Franks. "O.K., Don, we'll go after 'em.
I'll have the crew set up a couple of mass detectors at either end of
the station. We'll triangulate, and calculate, and hope to hit the right
correction factor. We'll find them and keep them in line. You figure
out a means of contacting them, huh?"
"_I'll_ set up the detectors and _you_ find the means," suggested Don.
"No go. You're the director of communications."
Don sighed a false sigh. "Arden, hand me my electronics text," he said.
"And shall I wipe your fevered brow?" cooed Arden.
"Leave him alone," directed Franks. "You distract him."
"It seems to me that you two are taking this rather lightly," said
Arden.
"What do you want us to do? Get down on the floor and chew on the rug?
You know us better than that. If we can find the answer to contacting a
spaceship in flight, we'll add another flower to our flag. But we can't
do it by clawing through the first edition of Henney's 'Handbook of
Radio Engineering.' It will be done by the seat of our pants if at all;
a pair of side-cutters and a spool of wire, a hunk of string and a lump
of solder, a--"
"A rag, a bone, and a hank of hair?" asked Franks.
"Leave Kipling out of this. He didn't have to cover the whole Solar
System. So let's get cooking."
Don and Walt left the office just a trifle on the fast side. Arden
looked after them, out through the open door, shaking her head until
she remembered something that she could do. She smiled and went to her
typewriter and pounded out a message back to Williams at Interplanet.
It read: "Channing and Franks at work on contacting the _Empress of
Kolain_. Will do our best." And she signed it: "Venus Equilateral."
* * * * *
Unknowing of the storm, the _Empress of Kolain_ sped silently through
the void, accelerating constantly at one gee. Hour after hour she was
adding to her velocity, building it up to a speed that would make the
trip in days, and not weeks. Her drivers flared dull red no more, for
there was not atmosphere for the electronic stream to excite. Her few
portholes sparkled with light, but they were nothing in comparison to
the starry curtain of the background.
Her hull was of a neutral color, and though the sun glanced from her
metal flanks, a reflection from a convex side is not productive of a
beam of light. It spreads according to the degree of convexity and is
soon lost.
What constitutes an apparent absence? The answer to that question is
the example of a ship in space flight. The _Empress of Kolain_ did
not radiate anything detectable in the electromagnetic scale from
ultralong waves to ultrahigh frequencies; nothing at all that could
be detected at any distance beyond a few thousand miles. The sweep of
her meteor-spotting equipment would pass a spot in micro-seconds at a
hundred miles; at the distance from the Relay Station, the sweep of
the beam would be curved like the stream of water from a swung hose
and therefore useless for direction finding, even though the Station's
excellent equipment could pick up the signal. And so fleeting would be
the touch of the spotting beam that the best equipment ever known or
made would have no time to react, thus marking the signal.
Theorists claim a thing nonexistent if it cannot be detected. The
_Empress of Kolain_ was invisible. It was undetectable to radio
waves. It was in space, so no physical wave could be transmitted
to be depicted as sound. Its mass was inconsiderable. Its size was
comparatively sub-microscopic, and therefore it would occult few,
if any, stars. Therefore, to all intents and purposes, the _Empress
of Kolain_ was nonexistent, and would remain in that state of
material-non-being until it came to life again upon its landing at
Venus.
Yet the _Empress of Kolain_ existed in the minds of the men who were
to find her. Like the shot unseen, fired from a distant cannon, the
_Empress of Kolain_ was coming at them with ever-mounting velocity, its
unseen course a theoretical curve.
And the ship, like the projectile, would land if the men who knew of
her failed in their purpose.
Don Channing and Walt Franks found their man in the combined dining
room and bar--the only one in many million miles. They surrounded him,
ordered a sandwich and beer, and began to tell him their troubles.
Charles Thomas listened for about three minutes. "Boy," he grinned,
"being up in that shiny, plush-lined office has sure done plenty to
your think-tank, Don."
Channing stopped talking. "Proceed," he said. "In what way has my
perspective been warped."
"You talk like Burbank," said Thomas, mentioning a sore spot of some
months past. "You think a mass detector would work at this distance?
Nuts, fellow. It might, if there were nothing else in the place to
interfere. But you want to shoot out near Mars. Mars is on the other
side of the Sun--an Evening Star to anyone on Terra. You want us to
shoot a slap-happy beam like the mass detector out past Sol; and then a
hundred and forty million miles beyond in the faint hope that you can
triangulate upon a little mite of matter; a stinking six hundred-odd
feet of aluminum hull mostly filled with air and some machinery and
so on. Brother, what do you think all the rest of the planets will do
to your little piddling beam? Retract, or perhaps abrogate the law of
universal gravitation?"
"Crushed," said Franks with a sorry attempt at a smile.
"_Phew!_" agreed Channing. "Maybe I should know more about mass
detectors."
"Forget it," said Charles. "The only thing that mass detectors are any
good for is to conjure up beautiful bubble dreams, which anybody who
knows about 'em can break with the cold point of icy logic."
"What would you do?" asked Channing.
"Darned if I know. We might flash 'em with a big mirror--if we had a
big mirror and they weren't heading right into the Sun."
"Let's see," mused Franks, making tabulations on the tablecloth.
"They're a couple of hundred million miles away. In order that your
mirror present a recognizable disk, it should be about twice the
diameter of Venus as seen from Terra. That's eight thousand miles
in--at best visibility--say, eighty million or a thousand-to-one ratio.
The _Empress of Kolain_ is heading at us from some two hundred million,
so at a thousand-to-one ratio our mirror would have to be twenty
thousand miles across. Some mirror!"
Don tipped Walt's beer over the edge of the table, and while the other
man was busy mopping up and muttering unprintables, Don said to Thomas:
"This is serious and it isn't. Nobody's going to lose their skin if we
don't, but a problem has been put to us and we're going to crack it if
we have to skin our teeth to do it."
"You can't calculate their position?"
"Sure. Within a couple of thousand miles we can. That isn't close
enough."
"No, it isn't," agreed Chuck.
* * * * *
Silence fell for a minute. It was broken by Arden, who came in waving
a telegram. She sat down and appropriated Channing's glass, which
had not been touched. Don opened the sheet and read: "Have received
confirmation of your effort. I repeat, spare no expense!" It was
signed: "Williams, Interplanet."
"Does that letter offer mean anything to you?" asked Arden.
"Sure," agreed Don. "But at the time we're stumped. Should we be doing
something?"
"Anything, I should think, would be better than what you're doing at
present. Or does that dinner-and-beer come under the term 'Expenses'?"
Arden stood up, tossed Channing's napkin at him, and started toward
the door. Channing watched her go, his hand making motions on the
tablecloth. His eyes fell to the table and he took Franks' pencil and
drew a long curve from a spot of gravy on one side of the table to a
touch of coffee stain on the other. The curve went through a bit of
grape jelly near the first stain.
"Here goes the tablecloth strategist," said Franks. "What now, little
man?"
"That spot of gravy," explained Don, "is Mars. The jelly is the
_Empress of Kolain_. Coffee stain is Venus, and up here by this
cigarette burn is Venus Equilateral. Get me?"
"Yop, that's clear enough."
"Now it would be the job for seventeen astronomers for nine weeks to
predict the movement of the jelly spot with respect to the usual astral
standards. But, fellows, we know the acceleration of the _Empress of
Kolain_, and we know her position with respect to the orbit of Mars at
the instant of take-off. We can correct for Mars' advance along her--or
his--orbit. We can figure the position of the _Empress of Kolain_ from
her angular distance from Mars! That's the only thing we need know. We
don't give a ten-dollar damn about her true position."
Channing began to write equations on the tablecloth. "You see, they
aren't moving so fast with respect to us. The course is foreshortened
as they are coming almost in line with Venus Equilateral, curving
outward and away from the Sun. Her course, as we see it from the
Station here, will be a long radius upward curve, slightly on the
parabolic side. Like all long-range cruises, the _Empress of Kolain_
will heist herself slightly above the plane of the ecliptic to avoid
the swarm of meteors that follow about the Sun in the same plane as the
planets, lifting the highest at the point of greatest velocity."
"I get it," said Franks. "We get the best beam controller we have to
keep the planet on the cross hairs. We apply a spiral cam to advance
the beam along the orbit. Right?"
"Right." Don sketched a conical section on the tablecloth and added
dimensions. He checked his dimensions against the long string of
equations, and nodded. "We'll drive this cockeyed-looking cam with an
isochronic clock, and then squirt a beam out there. Thank the Lord for
the way our beam transmitters work."
"You mean the effect of reflected waves," asked Chuck.
"Sure. They're like light--only they ain't. We're going to use a
glorified meteor detector. We'll control the spread and dispersion
so that we cover a healthy hundred miles or so, which will give us
sufficient power, I believe. If not, we'll have to tighten the beam.
At any rate, spreading from a point source to an object of a given
dimension, the waves rebound as though the object were a plane mirror.
That will give us a dispersion of twice the dimension of the _Empress
of Kolain's_ planar projection through this axis. Twelve hundred feet
isn't much, but once we get her on the beam and have confirmation, we
can forget the rebound. We'll have her pinned."
"And then?" asked Franks.
"Then we will have left the small end, which I'll give to you, Walt, so
that you can have part of the credit."
Walt shook his head. "The easy part," he said uncheerfully. "By which
you mean the manner in which we contact them and make them listen to
us?"
"That's her," said Don with a cheerful smile.
* * * * *
"Fine!" said Thomas. "Now what do we do?"
"Clear up this mess so we can make the cam. This drawing will do, just
grab the tablecloth."
Joe, the operator of Equilateral's one and only establishment for
the benefit of the stomach, came up as the three men began to move
their glasses and dishes over to an empty table. "What makes with the
tablecloth?" he asked. "Don't you want a piece of carbon paper and
another tablecloth?"
"No," said Don nonchalantly. "This single copy will do."
"We lose lots of tablecloths that way," said Joe. "It's tough, running
a restaurant on Equilateral. I tried using paper ones once, but that
didn't work. I had 'em printed, but when the Solar System was on 'em,
you fellows drew schematic diagrams for a new coupler circuit. I put
all kinds of radio circuits on them, and the gang drew plans for
antenna arrays. I gave up and put pads of paper on each table, and the
boys used them to make folded paper airplanes and they shot them all
over the place. Why don't you guys grow up?"
"Cheer up, Joe. But if this tablecloth won't run through the blueprint
machine, we'll squawk!"
Joe looked downcast, and Franks hurried to explain: "It isn't that bad,
Joe. We won't try it. We just want to have these figures so we won't
have to run through the math again. We'll return the cloth."
"Yeah," said Joe at their retreating figures. "And for the rest of its
usefulness it will be full of curves, drawings, and a complete set of
astrogating equations." He shrugged his shoulders and went for a new
tablecloth.
Don, Walt, and Charles took their improvised drawing to the machine
shop, where they put it in the hands of the master mechanic.
"This thing has a top requirement," Don told him, "Make it as quick as
you can."
Master Mechanic Walton took the cloth and said: "You forgot the note.
You know, 'Work to dimensions shown, do not scale this drawing.' Lord,
Don, this silly-looking cam will take a man about six hours to do.
It'll have to be right on the button all over, no tolerance. I'll have
to cut it to the 'T' and then lap it smooth with polishing compound.
Then what'll you test it on?"
"Sodium light interferometer. Can you do it in four hours?"
"If nothing goes wrong. Brass all right?"
"Anything you say. It'll only be used once. Anything of sufficient
hardness to withstand a single usage will do."
"I'll use brass then. Or free-cutting steel may be better. If you make
it soft you have the chance of cutting too much off with your lapping
compound. We'll take care of it, Don. The rest of this stuff isn't too
hard. Your framework and so on can be whittled out and pasted together
from standard girders, right?"
"Sure. Plaster them together any way you can. And we don't want them
painted. As long as she works, phooey to the looks."
"Fine," said Walton. "I'll have the business installed in the Beam
Control Room in nine hours. Complete and ready to work."
"That nine hours is a minimum?"
"Absolutely. After we cut and polish that screwball cam, we'll have to
check it, and then you'll have to check it. Then the silly thing will
have to be installed and its concentricity must be checked to the last
wave length of cadmium light. That'll take us a couple of hours, I
bet. The rest of the works will be ready, checked, and waiting for the
ding-busted cam."
"Yeah," agreed Franks. "Then we'll have to get up there with our works
and put the electricals on the mechanicals. My guess, Don, is a good,
healthy twelve hours before we can begin to squirt our signal."
* * * * *
Twelve hours is not much in the life of a man; it is less in the life
of a planet. The Terran standard of gravity is so small that it is
expressed in feet per second. But when the two are coupled together as
a measure of travel, and the standard Terran gee is applied for twelve
hours steady, it builds up to almost three hundred miles per second,
and by the end of that twelve hours, six million miles have fled into
the past.
Now take a look at Mars. It is a small, red mite in the sky, its
diameter some four thousand miles. Sol is eight hundred thousand
miles in diameter. Six million miles from Mars, then, can be crudely
expressed by visualizing a point eight times the diameter of the Sun
away from Mars, and you have the distance that the _Empress of Kolain_
had come from Mars.
But the ship was heading in at an angle, and the six million miles did
not subtend the above arc. From Venus Equilateral, the position of the
_Empress of Kolain_ was more like two diameters of the Sun from Mars,
slightly to the north and on the side away from Sol.
It may sound like a problem for the distant future, this pointing
a radio beam at a planet, but it is no different than Galileo's
attempts to see Jupiter through his Optik Glass. Of course, it has had
refinements that have enabled men to make several hundred hours of
exposure of a star on a photographic plate. So if men can maintain a
telescope on a star, night after night, to build up a faint image, they
can also maintain a beamed transmission wave on a planet.
All you need is a place to stand; a firm, immobile platform. The
three-mile-long, one-mile-diameter mass of Venus Equilateral offered
such a platform. It rotated smoothly, and upon its 'business' end a
hardened and highly polished set of rails maintained projectors that
were pointed at the planets. These were parabolic reflectors that
focused ultra-high-frequency waves into tight beams which were hurled
at Mars, Terra, and Venus for communication.
And because the beams were acted upon by all of the trivia in the
Solar System, highly trained technicians stood their tricks at the
beam controls, correcting by sensitive verniers any deviation of the
beams. In fifty million miles, even the bending of electromagnetic
waves by the Sun's mass had to be considered. Sunspots made known
their presence. And the vagaries of land transmission were present in
a hundred ways due to the distance and the necessity of concentrating
every milliwatt of available power on the target.
This problem of the _Empress of Kolain_ was different. Spaceships were
invisible, therefore the beam-control man must sight on Mars and the
mechanical cam would keep the ship in sight of the beam.
The hours went past in a peculiar mixture of speed and slowness. On one
hand the minutes sped by swiftly and fleetingly, each tick of the clock
adding to the lost moments, never to be regained. Time, being precious,
seemed to slip through their fingers like sifting sand.
On the other hand, the time that must be spent in preparation of the
equipment went slow. Always it was in the future, that time when their
experiment must either prove a success or a failure. Always there was
another hour of preparatory work before the parabolic reflector was
mounted; and then another hour before it swung freely and perfectly
in its new mounting. Then the minutes were spent in anticipation of
the instant that the power stage of the transmitter was tested and the
megawatts of ultra-high-frequency energy poured into the single rod
that acted as a radiator.
It was a singularly disappointing sight. The rod glowed not, and the
reflector was the same as it was before the rod drew power. But the
meters read and the generators moaned, and the pyrometers in the
insulators mounted as the losses converted the small quantity of energy
into heat. But the rod drew power, and the parabolic reflector beamed
that power into a tight beam and hurled it out on a die-true line.
Invisible power that could be used in communications.
Then the cam was installed. The time went by even slower then, because
the cam must be lapped and polished to absolute perfection, not only of
its own surface but to absolute concentricity to the shaft on which it
turned.
But eventually the job was finished, and the men stood back, their eyes
expectantly upon Don Channing and Walt Franks.
* * * * *
Don spoke to the man chosen to control the beam. "You can start any
time now. Keep her knifed clean, if you can."
The man grinned at Channing. "If the devils that roam the void are with
us we'll have no trouble. We should all pray for a phrase used by some
characters in a magazine I read once: 'Clear ether!' We could use some
right now."
He applied his eyes to the telescope. He fiddled with the verniers
for a brief time, made a major adjustment on a larger handwheel, and
then said, without removing his eye from the 'scope, "That's it, Dr.
Channing."
Don answered: "O.K., Jim, but you can use the screen now. We aren't
going to make you squint through that pipe for the next few hours
straight."
"That's all right. I'll use the screen as soon as we can prove we're
right. Ready?"
"Ready," said Channing.
Franks closed a tiny switch. Below, in the transmitter room, relays
clicked and heavy-duty contacts closed with blue fire. Meters began
to climb upward across their scales, and the generators moaned in a
descending whine. A shielded monitor began to glow, indicating that
full power was vomiting from the mouth of the reflector.
And out from the projector there went, like a spearhead, a wavefront of
circularly polarized microwaves. Die-true they sped, crossing the void
like a line of sight to an invisible spot above Mars and to the left.
Out past the Sun, where they bent inward just enough to make Jim's job
tough. Out across the open sky they sped at the velocity of light, and
taking sixteen minutes to get there.
Would it--or wouldn't it?