Teleportation or its equivalent.
Gone the subjective passage of hours in hyper-space.
Earned--if you were strong enough or brave enough to earn it--the
ability to travel instantly from one humanoid world to another.
Instantly. Perhaps from any one point on any humanoid world to any one
point, precise, specific, exact, on another world.
To plunder.
Or assassinate.
Or control the lives of men, everywhere.
_Sans_ ship.
_Sans_ fear.
_Sans_ the possibility of being caught or stopped.
Sweating, Garr Symm said: "Bring the _Dog Star_ down after them, Ramar
Chind."
* * * * *
Ramsey smiled without humor. "What now, little lady?" he said mockingly.
"Shut up. Oh, shut up!"
"What are you going to do now?"
"I told you to shut up. I have to think."
"I didn't know a gorgeous tri-di actress ever had to think."
"Let me see those figures again," Margot said.
Ramsey handed her the tapes from the _Enterprise's_ environment-checker.
Temperature: minus two hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit.
Atmosphere: none.
Gravity: eight-tenths Earth-norm.
"And we don't have a spacesuit aboard," Ramsey said.
"But it can't be. It can't. This is the home of proto-man. I know it is.
But if I went out there I'd perish from cold in seconds and lack of air
in minutes."
"That's right," Ramsey said almost cheerfully. "So do I take the ship
back up?"
"I hate you, Jason Ramsey. Oh, I hate you!" Margot cried. Then suddenly:
"Wait! Wait a minute! What was that you were thinking? Tell me! You must
tell me--"
Ramsey shook his head and tried to force the thoughts from his mind with
doggerel. Ben Adam, he thought. Abou Ben Adam, Humpty Dumpty, hurry,
hurry, hurry, the only two headed get yours here the sum of the square
of the sides is equal to the square of the hyper-space, no, mustn't
think that mimsy were the borogroves and the momraths now what the heck
did the momraths do anyhow absolute zero is the temperature at which
all molecular activity....
"What were you thinking, Ramsey?"
His mind was a labyrinth. There were thousands of discrete thoughts, of
course. Millions of them, collected over a lifetime. But all at once he
did not know his way through that labyrinth and his thoughts kept
whirling back to the one Margot Dennison wanted as if, somehow, she
could pluck it from his mind.
She stood before him, her brow furrowed, sweat beading her pretty face.
And she was winning, forcing the thought to take shape in Ramsey's
mind--
_But if I went out there I'd perish from cold in seconds and lack of air
in minutes._
_Cold_, came the known and unbidden thoughts to Ramsey's struggling
mind. _And lack of air. Attributes of extension, of space_, but measured
by duration, by time. _And since time does not exist in hyper-space, the
vacuum out there and the terrible, killing cold, could have no effect on
you. You could go out there perfectly protected from the lethal
environment by the absence of the time dimension._