"I'd rather ask you something. How did you know it would work?"
"You might say I became an expert in psychology over night," Hawkins
replied. "Oh, not the scientific kind that you practice--but the every
day kind that most people mean when they use the word. I discovered,
for example, that because of a misunderstanding on the part of the
communications people, we continued to send messages home after the
alien had specifically warned us not to do so. At first I thought he
might be ignoring this infraction of his rules, but then I began to
wonder if it didn't mean that he just wasn't aware of what we were
doing. I remembered that he talked a great deal about a C^{2} drive
system which he claimed was so much better than the type we used. But
when I asked the Navigator to do a little figuring, I discovered that
by using subspace, we can actually get places much faster than his race
does.
"It all added up to the fact that his race had never stumbled onto the
use of subspace. I know that sounds incredible, but when I checked with
one of the top physicists, I found out that we happened onto it by
sheer accident--and an impossibly stupid one at that--and not through
any high-level theorizing. The theory came later, after the process had
been demonstrated in a laboratory.
"For a while I still couldn't believe it. But when we discovered that
his space ship was a very small one--too small to utilize the subspace
drive--I knew my guess had been correct. So I tricked him into letting
us get into position where we could activate the drive--and had the
engineers increase the effective radius so that we could pull Clarion
and her three planets into subspace with us." Hawkins paused for a few
seconds as he turned back to the observation window. "We'll need every
sun and every planet we can lay our hands on."
Broussard leaned comfortably back against the door. "I think you were
wise to take the pictures of the destruction of that fourth planet. We
may need them to convince 'the folks back home' that this was the only
solution to the problem."
Hawkins agreed with him. "They won't like giving up all the universe
they've come to be used to, just to run away and hide in subspace. And
you know, I think the poets and the sailors and the young people in
love will hate us most of all."
"How do you mean?" asked Broussard.
"No more heaven full of stars to write poems about, to sail true
courses by, and to sing love songs under. I guess a lot of us will be
lonely for all the stars."
"Do you think they'll ever find us?" Broussard asked, changing the
subject. "From the look on Lan Sur's face when he told about that other
world, I suspect they'll move heaven and earth to find out where we've
run to."
"Find us? The Dakn Empire? I just don't know. We've got a thousand
ships equipped with the subspace drive. That's a thousand or so solar
systems we can pull through into subspace before they can catch up
with us--I hope. But we'll have to be careful. If one of our ships is
ever caught, and they discover the drive, we're all done for. I doubt
that they'll show us much mercy.
"A thousand suns--and only a handful of usable worlds in the whole lot
of them. Not much for a race that's grown as fast as ours has. And to
some of us, I guess, subspace will never be quite the same as the one
we grew up in--and came to know and love." Hawkins shook his head sadly.
"But _if_ they find us?" Broussard insisted.
"Well, at least we'll have had time to prepare. Perhaps a year, perhaps
ten, perhaps a thousand. But we beat them this time, and maybe we can
do it again."
For a long time he continued to stare quietly into the blackness. "I
just don't know...."