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The new orders, relayed across a light-year of space, were not intercepted by any terrestrial receiving device, however sensitive. But they were received and recorded perfectly in the mind of the tenth android. Frank Corson and Les King sat in a coffee shop and regarded each other with a certain wariness. "It's like this, at least from where I sit," King said.
On his screens now, Mira appeared deep violet, for he was approaching at a speed greater than that of light, and even this projected light of Mira was badly distorted. "The distance is half a light-year now, sir," reported the navigation officer. "Reduce the speed, then, to normal velocity for these ranges. What reserve of fuel have we?" "Less than one thousand pounds.
We talk glibly about ten to the hundredth power, but emotionally we still count, 'One, Two, Three, Many. A ship in hyperspace logs about a light-year an hour. You can go from here to Excalibur in thirty hours. But you could send a radio message announcing the birth of a son, and he'd be a father before it was received.
Then it hopped another half light-year, and so on. For a long, long time it traveled in this jerky fashion. Eventually, moving as it did in the straightest of straight lines, its photocells reported that it neared a star which had achieved first-magnitude brightness. It paused a little longer than usual while its action-circuits shifted.
One could imagine falling forty-two thousand miles, where one couldn't imagine falling a light-year. Calhoun was walking on the steel plates of a gigantic space-ship which floated among dozens of its fellows, all seeming derelicts and seemingly abandoned. He was able to walk on the nearest because of magnetic-soled shoes.
Sometime the natives of Thor won't be fighting anybody at all, or the Federation Member Republic of Venus will have some nonscandalous politics, and either will be the man-bites-dog story to end man-bites-dog stories. All the news is at least six months old, some more than a year. A spaceship can log a light-year in sixty-odd hours, but radio waves still crawl along at the same old 186,000 mps.
The physicists had to make mystic passes in front of meters and mutter about residual folds in stress-free space. Our task was easy, because we were about half a light-year from the sun. The crew's job was also easy: they found what went wrong in less than half an hour. "It still seems incredible. To program the ship for a star-jump, you merely told it where you were and where you wanted to go.
For purely astronomical purposes the most convenient unit is the distance corresponding to a parallax of 1", which is a little more than 200,000 times the sun's distance. But for the purposes of all but the professional astronomer the most convenient unit will be the light-year that is, the distance through which light would travel in one year.
"The way I see it, everybody who's within a light-year of this Rivers killing is trying to pin the medal on somebody else," Ritter was saying. "The Lawrence girl was afraid young Jarrett had done it; right away, she sicced you onto Gillis. Gillis didn't lose any time putting McKenna and Farnsworth onto Gresham.
Rather thought I'd like to visit Mars and Jupiter in person. "But when it comes to leaving the solar system entirely the telepathic method is the only one that will work; even the nearest of the fixed stars is out of the question." "How far is that?" Smith inquired. "The nearest? About four and a half light-years." "Yes, but what's a light-year?"
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