She looked puzzled. "Come again?"
"Look, Eldreth, how far did you go in mathematics?"
"Me? I flunked improper fractions. Miss Mimsey was very vexed with me."
"Miss Mimsey?"
"Miss Mimsey's School for Young Ladies, so you see I can listen with an open mind." She made a face. "But you told me that all you went to was a country high school and didn't get to finish at that. Huh?"
"Yes, but I learned from my uncle. He was a great mathematician. Well, he didn't have any theorems named after him--but a great one just the same, _I_ think." He paused. "I don't know exactly how to tell you; it takes equations. Say! Could you lend me that scarf you're wearing for a minute?"
"Huh? Why, sure." She removed it from her neck.
It was a photoprint showing a stylized picture of the solar system, a souvenir of Solar Union Day. In the middle of the square of cloth was the conventional sunburst surrounded by circles representing orbits of solar planets, with a few comets thrown in. The scale was badly distorted and it was useless as a structural picture of the home system, but it sufficed. Max took it and said, "Here's Mars."
Eldreth said, "You read it. That's cheating."
"Hush a moment. Here's Jupiter. To go from Mars to Jupiter you have to go from here to here, don't you?"
"Obviously."
"But suppose I fold it so that Mars is on top of Jupiter? What's to prevent just stepping across?"
"Nothing, I guess. Except that what works for that scarf wouldn't work very well in practice. Would it?"
"No, not that near to a star. But it works fine after you back away from a star quite a distance. You see, that's just what an anomaly is, a place where space is folded back on itself, turning a long distance into no distance at all."
"Then space _is_ warped."
"No, no, no! Look, I just folded your scarf. I didn't stretch it out of shape! I didn't even wrinide it. Space is the same way; it's crumpled like a piece of waste paper--but it's not warped, just crumpled. Through some extra dimensions, of course."
"I don't see any 'of course' about it."
"The math of it is simple, but it's hard to talk about because you can't see it. Space--_our_ space--may be crumpled up small enough to stuff into a coffee cup, all hundreds of thousands of light-years of it. A four-dimensional coffee cup, of course."
She sighed. "I don't see how a four-dimensional coffee cup could even hold coffee, much less a whole galaxy."
"No trouble at all. You could stuff this sheer scarf into a thimble. Same principle. But let me finish. They used to think that nothing could go faster than light. Well, that was both right and wrong. It ..."
"How can it be both?"
"That's one of the Horst anomalies. You can't go faster than light, not in our space. If you do, you burst out of it. But if you do it where space is folded back and congruent, you pop right back into our own space again--but a long way off. How far off depends on how it's folded. And that depends on the mass in the space, in a complicated fashion that can't be described in words but can be calculated."
"But suppose you do it just anywhere?"
"That's what happened to the first ones who tried it. They didn't come back. And that's why surveys are dangerous; survey ships go poking through anomalies that have been calculated but never tried. That's also why astrogators get paid so much. They have to head the ship for a place you can't see and they have to put the ship there just under the speed of light and they have to give it the gun at just the right world point. Drop a decimal point or use a short cut that covers up an indeterminancy and it's just too bad. Now we've been gunning at twenty-four gee ever since we left the atmosphere. We don't feel it of course because we are carried inside a discontinuity field at an artificial one gravity--that's another of the anomalies. But we're getting up close to the speed of light, up against the Einstein Wall; pretty soon we'll be squeezed through like a watermelon seed between your finger and thumb and we'll come out near Theta Centauri fifty-eight light-years away. Simple, if you look at it right."
She shivered. "_If_ we come out, you mean."
"Well ... I suppose so. But it's not as dangerous as helicopters. And look at it this way: if it weren't for the anomalies, there never would have been any way for us to reach the stars; the distances are too great. But looking back, it is obvious that all that emptiness couldn't be real--there _had_ to be the anomalies. That's what my uncle used to say."
"I suppose he must have been right, even if I don't understand it." She scrambled to her feet. "But I do know that I had better hoof it back upstairs, or Mrs. Dumont may change her mind." She hugged Mr. Chips and shoved the little creature into Max's arms. "Walk the baby--that's a pal."
8 THREE WAYS TO GET AHEAD
Max intended to stay awake during the first transition, but he slept through it. It took place shortly after five in the morning, ship's time. When he was awakened by idlers' reveille at six it was all over. He jerked on his clothes, fuming at not having awakened earlier, and hurried to the upper decks. The passageways above Charlie deck were silent and empty; even the early risers among the passengers would not be up for another hour. He went at once to the Bifrost Lounge and crossed it to the view port, placed there for the pleasure of passengers.
The stars looked normal but the familiar, age-old constellations were gone. Only the Milky Way, our own galaxy, seemed as usual--to that enormous spiral of stars, some hundred thousand light-years across, a tiny displacement of less than sixty light-years was inconsequential.
One extremely bright yellow-white star was visible; Max decided that it must be Theta Centauri, sun of Garson's Planet, their first stop. He left shortly, not wanting to chance being found loafing in passengers' country. The sand boxes which constituted his excuse were then replaced with greater speed than usual and he was back in crew's quarters in time for breakfast.
The passage to Garson's Planet took most of a month even at the high boost possible to Horst-Conrad ship. Eldreth continued to make daily trips to see Mr. Chips--and to talk with and play 3-dee chess with Max. He learned that while she had not been born on Hespera, but in Auckland on Terra, nevertheless Hespera was her home. "Daddy sent me back to have them turn me into a lady, but it didn't take."
"What do you mean?"
She grinned. "I'm a problem. That's why I've been sent for. You're in check, Max. Chipsie! Put that back. I think the little demon is playing on your side."
He gradually pieced together what she meant. Miss Mimsey's school had been the third from which she had been expelled. She did not like Earth, she was determined to go home, and she had created a reign of terror at each institution to which she had been entrusted. Her widower father had been determined that she must have a "proper" education, but she had been in a better strategic position to impose her will--her father's Earthside attorneys had washed their hands of her and shipped her home.
Sam made the mistake of joshing Max about Eldreth. "Have you gotten her to set the day yet, old son?"
"Who set what day?"
"Now, now! Everybody in the ship knows about it, except possibly the Captain. Why play dumb with your old pal?"
"I don't know what you are talking about!"
"I wasn't criticizing, I was admiring. I'd never have the nerve to plot so high a trajectory myself. But as grandpop always said, there are just three ways to get ahead; sweat and genius, getting born into the right family, or marrying into it. Of the three, marrying the boss's daughter is the best, because-- Hey! Take it easy!" Sam skipped back out of range.
"Take that back!"
"I do, I do. I was wrong. But my remarks were inspired by sheer admiration. Mistaken, I admit. So I apologize and withdraw the admiration."