Thirty minutes went by before Peace became restless. He toyed with the flattened corpse of his plastic toad, threw it irreverently to the floor, went to the coffee machine and found it was empty, then walked around the room several times, growing more and more impatient. The gloomy torpor of the other recruits, who remained slumped on the benches, served to heighten his annoyance and resentment at being penned up like an animal. Finally, losing his temper altogether, he went to the door by which he had entered the room and tried to throw it open. It refused to move. He slid his hand into a recess in the metal, pressed down on a lever within and began hitting the door with his shoulder.
“Hey, look at old Warren,” somebody said in the background. “He’s pretending to open the door.”
“That’s Warren for you,” Benger commented. “Anything for a laugh.”
“Wait a minute,” cut in another voice, “I think he’s really trying to…”
“My God! He’s trying to open the door!”
A bench was knocked over and an instant later Peace found himself lying on the floor, with Vernie Ryan sitting on his chest. Another recruit was sprawled across his legs, immobilizing him.
“Sorry to have to do this, Warren,” Ryan said, panting. “I know a guy like you doesn’t care about anything, but the rest of us aren’t ready to die.”
“Die? What are you talking about?” Peace found it difficult to speak with Ryan’s bulk compressing his ribcage. “I just wanted to look for our ship.”
Ryan exchanged glances with the onlookers. “This is our ship, Warren. We’re in it. Didn’t you know we took off half an hour ago?”
“In this tin box!” Peace sneered his disbelief. “Do I look like an idiot?”
Fair’s dark face came into view. “Which idiot do you mean?”
“That’s enough, Coppy,” Ryan said. “Remember Warren’s memory has been wiped out. He knows hardly anything about anything.”
Peace fought for breath. “I know this isn’t a spaceship, that’s for sure. It isn’t even the right shape.”
“It doesn’t have to be any special shape,” Ryan explained. “It doesn’t have to be streamlined—not when it doesn’t move.”
“Got you!” Peace said triumphantly. “You said we took off. How can we take off in something that doesn’t move?”
Fair appeared again. “This boy was in orbit before we started.”
“Lay off him, Coppy.” Ryan looked down at Peace with a kindly, pleading expression on his face, like a junior school teacher giving special attention to a dull child. “Don’t you see, Warren, that a spaceship which moved would never get you anywhere?”
“No, I…” In view of Ryan’s obvious sincere ity, Peace began to doubt his own position.
“Who said so?”
“Albert Einstein, among others. Oh, you could do a bit of local planet-hopping like they did in the old days, but your ship would never be able to go faster than the speed of light, which means it would be pretty useless for interstellar work. The light barrier would see to that.”
“So you get around the light barrier by using a ship which doesn’t move?”
“That’s it!” Ryan looked pleased. “You’re getting the idea.”
“I am?”
“Of course you are. A brainy character like you… Already you’ll be asking yourself what a spaceship designer would do if all the conventional forms of locomotion were ruled out.”
“That’s right,” Peace admitted. “That’s what I’m asking myself.”
“I knew it! And already your mind will be sifting through the various possibilities…”
“Yes, yes,” Peace said, compliantly, feeling the growing excitement of intellectual adventure.
“… spurning one unsatisfactory solution after another …”
“Yes, yes.”
“… until it finally settles on …”
“Yes, yes.”
“… non-Elucidean tachyon displacement.”
“Oh!” Peace tried to conceal his disappointment.
“Non-Elucidean tachyon displacement.”
Ryan nodded eagerly. “Which, of course, is just another way of saying instantaneous matter transmission.”
Peace’s hopes picked up, but only momentarily. “If it’s instantaneous why have we been sitting around in here for so long?”
“Well, it can’t be completely instantaneous— that would involve us with the logical absurdity of being in two different places at once. But it’s so close to instantaneous that you wouldn’t notice the difference.”
“I notice the difference,” Peace said. “It seems to me that forty minutes…”
“Ah, but you haven’t thought it through, Warren. We don’t complete journeys in one jump.”
“Why not?”
“Because you can’t have too great a distance between your transmitting station and your receiving station. Above a certain range there’s a loss of fidelity, and a risk of incomplete reception.” A solemn expression flitted across Ryan’s face. “That could be very nasty.”
“So what sort of distance do we transmit across?”
“Two hundred metres.”
“Two hun…!” Peace renewed his efforts to wriggle free, but fell back, exhausted.
“I’m sorry, Warren—we can’t risk letting you up until you understand that we’re out in space and would all be killed if you opened that door.”
“All right,” Peace said in a strangled voice. “Tell me the rest. Tell me we’ve got chains of matter transceivers all over the galaxy… trillions of them… two hundred metres apart.”
“Now you’re being silly,” Ryan reproved. “Just when you were doing so well, too.”
“I’m sorry—I won’t argue again. Teach me how it all works.”
“I wouldn’t presume to try teaching anything to a well-educated guy like you, Warren. You’re working it out for yourself. Remember?”
“Yes, but…” Peace gazed up into Ryan’s watchful eyes, seeking inspiration. “Give me a clue, Vernie.”
Ryan glanced at the others, most of whom, Peace was relieved to see, were nodding vigorously. “All right, then. Tell me what you noticed about this ship when you got down out of the personnel carrier.”
“Let’s see,” Peace said, anxious to co-operate. “It looked like a long, narrow metal box with a sort of low tower at each end.”
“Very good, Warren. Very observant. And how far apart would you say those towers were?”
“About two hundred metres, but I don’t see…” Peace stopped speaking as he noticed that Ryan’s eyes had brightened expectantly. “Two hun…” He broke off again, partly because the idea which had sprung into being in his mind was too preposterous for words, partly because Ryan had begun to bounce encouragingly on his chest, driving the air from his lungs.
“Go on, Warren,” Ryan urged. “It’s a privilege and a pleasure for me to see a first-class brain at work.”
“There’s a matter transmitter at the back of the ship,” Peace said in dazed tones. “And a matter receiver at the front of the ship. And the ship transmits itself forward two hundred metres at a time. And receives itself.”
“Stand up, Warren.” Ryan’s face glowed with vicarious pride as he got off Peace’s chest and helped him to his feet. “I knew you could figure it out for yourself, a bright boy like you.”