In other words, the design philosophy of the constructors was: This vessel is fully guaranteed and will always get you to your destination; but if it doesn’t, you might as well try finding another world while you are out there.
Tallon had never investigated the matter personally, but he was banking on the stories being true, for there was no point in his making any further jumps without some means of checking on his position. The possibilities of his getting within reach of a habitable world in fifteen years of continuous null-space leaps were perhaps one in a billion. He was not deceiving himself about the chances of success, but there was nothing else open to him; and vegetating, which he had tried for four days, was unacceptable. Besides, in a truly random universe, he might make only one jump and find himself hanging above Earth itself, almost able to breathe its atmosphere, to smell the smoke of leaf fires drifting in the soft thick air of October evenings.
He went to work on the central control complex. Two more days of rest and activity went by before he was satisfied that he had successfully reprogrammed the system to meet his new requirements. Working blind, he taxed his brain to its full extent, reaching the same degree of involvement that had enabled him to produce the eyesets.
Several times he found himself filled with a powerful sense of satisfaction. This, he thought, is what I’m good at. Why did I give up everything after college and take to star-jumping? Each time, unaccountably, he saw Helen’s red hair and unusual eyes superimposed on his mental picture of the control complex. And finally he had altered the astrogation network from a beast that would jump only when it knew where it was, to one that would refuse to move if its multiple senses detected a planetary system within reach.
When Tallon had finished he felt sane. His mind felt sharp and clear. He went to bed and slept soundly.
After breakfast, which was what he called the first meal after a period of sleep, Tallon made his way into the control room and sat down in the center seat. He hesitated, preparing himself for the psychic wrench, and hit the button that projected the ship into that other incomprehensible universe.
Click!
A flash of unbearable brilliance seared into his eyes; then the jump was over.
Tallon ripped off the eyeset and lay back in the big chair with his hands pressed over his eyes, his mind racing. He had forgotten the flash that had burned into his optic nerves when he’d jumped the Lyle Star out of New Wittenburg. There was nothing in any book that dealt with light flashes occurring in null-space; in fact most people experienced a momentary blindness during the transition. He listened to the computer and it was quiet, which meant he had not materialized within range of any planet in any part of the big, cold galaxy.
Mentally shrugging, he prepared to make another jump. This time he lowered the eyeset’s sensitivity to almost zero, and when the flash came it was greatly reduced in intensity. He took the eyeset off and made another jump that produced no light at all. With the eyeset back on, he made a fourth jump, and the flash was there again.
Tallon began to get excited, without knowing why. The flash was associated with the eyeset — that much seemed certain. But what was causing it? Was there some form of radiation in null-space that the eyeset was picking up? Hardly, because the circuits were designed to screen out anything except the incredibly subtle “phasing-of-phases” emanations from glial cells. What else then? There were no people in the null-space continuum.
Tallon got up from the seat and began to pace the control room — eight steps to the wall, turn, eight steps back.
He remembered the conversation with Helen Juste about her brother’s work for the Emm Luther probe-design center. Carl Juste had been working on an idea that the null-space universe might be extremely small, perhaps only a matter of yards in diameter. Could the reason no normal radio equipment ever worked in null-space (thus preventing humans from mapping its topography) be that they swamped themselves in their own signals, the troughs in the wave profiles filling up as they traveled endlessly around the tiny universe? If that were so, then the human eye — which transmitted its information not by amplitude, frequency, or even phase modulation, but by phasing of phases — could very well be the only piece of “electronic” equipment capable of operating in null-space without completely obliterating its own signal characteristics. And the eyeset could be the first receiver to work in null-space. But the question remained: What was causing the flash?
Tallon stopped short as the answer hit him: There were people in the null-space universe! The time taken for the warp generators to set up their field and collapse it again was less than two seconds on a minimum increment jump, but the trade lanes of the empire were busy. Millions of tons of freight and passengers passed through the zigzag routes of galactic commerce every hour, so at any given instant there were thousands of human beings in the null-space continuum. The blurring effect, caused by the signal repetition in the claustrophobic universe, could be enough to unite all their optic-nerve emanations into one vast, unorchestrated output.
He felt his heart pound with excitement. The glial-cell emanations were so weak as to be practically nonexistent. It was just possible they could cross the null-space universe only a few times before dying out, which meant there might well be directional information in the flash they produced in the eyeset — to say nothing of the possibility of a form of null-space travel controlled by human will instead of by the dictates of an alien geometry.
Tallon stood still for a moment. Then he started down the corridor heading for the Lyle Star’s maintenance workshop.
After a few minutes of fumbling among the tool racks, Tallon managed to identify a heavy power saw with a conventional reciprocating blade. He chose it in preference to a laser saw, on which it would be too easy for a blind man to lose his fingers.
Carrying the saw on his shoulder, he went to the stern of the ship, skirting the bales of compressed protein plant, and went to work on the first layer of radiation screening. He cut three panels, each measuring five feet by two feet, from the inch-thick material; then cut a smaller one, two-feet square. The metal-seeded plastic was cumbersome, and he fell several times while getting it up to the control deck.
With the screens in position, he made several attempts to use a multiwelder on them, but his blindness was too much of a handicap. Putting the welder aside, he made crude angle brackets by flattening and bending empty food cans, and bolted them to the plastic panels. The work took a long time — even a familiar hand drill became a tricky thing to use without sight — but in the end he had constructed something like a sentry box. He changed the bit in the drill and bored a single pinhole in the central wall of the box.
Tallon’s heart sank when be tried to move the box to where he wanted it and felt its uncompromising weight. He levered it unsuccessfully for a few minutes before remembering he was in a spaceship, an environment in which weight was a contrived luxury. He found the master switch for the artificial gravity system and turned it off, and the box was a lot easier to handle. He positioned it in front of the captain’s chair, with the hollow side facing aft, and turned the gravity on again.
Hoping for success and fearing disappointment, Tallon clambered over the central chair and worked himself forward into the box. The open side was almost in contact with the footrest of the chair, and when he knelt on the square of deck enclosed by the box’s three walls he was effectively screened from the direct-vision panels. He put his right hand around the side of the box, drew the null-space drive console close to him, and found the jump button. With his left hand he located the pinhole — now the only channel by which optic-nerve signals could reach him — and positioned his eyes directly behind it.