United States or Central African Republic ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"Oh, no, you wouldn't," Bart said softly. "Not even very many Mentorians will. You see, the Lhari don't trust humans too much. In the early days, men were always planting spies on Lhari ships, to try and steal the secret of warp-drive.
When he came to the account of the shift into warp-drive, he saw the faces of the press reporters, and realized that for them this was the story of the year or century: humans can endure star-drive! But he went on, not soft-pedaling Montano's attempted murder, his own choice, the trip to the Lhari world
Space, through the viewport, was no longer space as he had come to know it, but a strange eerie limbo, the star-tracks lengthening, shifting color until they filled the whole viewport with shimmering, gray, recrossing light. The unbelievable reaction of warp-drive thrust them through space faster than the lights of the surrounding stars, faster than imagination could follow.
We usually try to get him out before Vorongil officially takes notice. Of course, he sort of keeps his back turned," Ringg said, and they laughed together as they turned back to the drive room. Bart found himself thinking, Ringg's a good kid, before he pulled himself up, in sudden shock. He had lived through warp-drive!
But he knew this much; when the ship generated the frequencies which accelerated it beyond the speed of light, in effect the ship went into a sort of fourth dimension, and came out of it a good many light-years away. As far as Bart knew, no human being had ever survived warp-drive except in the suspended animation which they called cold-sleep.
"We can follow them inside a star-system, but then they pop into warp-drive, and we don't know where they go when they aren't running between our stars. "We've gathered together what information we do have, and we know that after a certain number of runs in our part of the galaxy, ships take off in the direction of Antares.
Bart's computers told him they were forging toward the sidereal location assigned for the first of the warp-drive shifts, which would take them some fifteen light-years toward Aldebaran. On the final watch before the warp-drive shift, the medical officer came around and relieved the Mentorians from duty. Bart watched them go, with a curious, cold, crawling apprehension.
If they were right, if it was a Lhari trick to reinforce their stranglehold on the human worlds and keep the warp-drive for themselves, then Bart had nothing to fear. But he was afraid. Why did the Mentorians endure this, never quite trusted, isolated among aliens? Raynor Three had said, Because I belong in space, because I'm never happy anywhere else.
Two more warp-drive shifts through space had taken the Swiftwing far, far out to the rim of the known galaxy, and now the great crimson coal of Antares burned in their viewports. Antares had twelve planets, the outermost of which far away now, at the furthest point in its orbit from the point of the Swiftwing's entry into the system was a small captive sun.
There were blotchy worms of light like the star-trails of peaking warp-drive through the viewport, colors shifting and receding, a green star, the red eye of Antares. Then the peak-point faded, his mind began to decelerate and angle slowly down and down into the field of awareness, and he became fuzzily aware that he was lying full length on a sort of couch. He shook his head groggily. It hurt.
Word Of The Day