If the moment of destruction had been longer, the pain would have been unbearable. But the transmat field ripped the Technarch’s body molecule from molecule in so tiny a fragment of a micro-second that his neural system could not possibly have relayed the pain; and the restoration to life came with equal speed. Whole and undamaged, McKenzie stepped through the field and out, almost instantly later, in the transmat cubicle at Central Australia spaceport, in what once had been the barren Gibson Desert and which now harbored Earth’s largest spacefield.

It had been shortly before noon in New York; here, it was early the following morning. A wall clock read 0213 hours. McKenzie left the transmat cubicle.

They spotted him at once; the Technarch’s toweringly commanding figure was a familiar sight here, and they came running to greet him. They were a tense lot. McKenzie smiled a Technarch’s greeting at Daviot and Leeson, who had developed the warp-drive that powered the experimental ship; at Herbig, the spaceport commandant; at Jesperson, the coordinator of faster-than-light research.

McKenzie asked, “What’s the news from the ship?”

Jesperson grinned boyishly. “They sent the all-okay signal five minutes ago. They’re in a deceleration orbit, coming down on rocket drive, and they’ll make touchdown at 0233 hours.”

“How about their trip?”

Leeson said in his rumbling basso, “It seems they made it out and back.”

“We don’t know that for sure,” Daviot objected.

McKenzie scowled. “Make up your minds.”

Daviot said, “All we know is that they quote switched from warp-drive to plasma-drive some time last evening near the orbit of Jupiter, unquote.”

“Doesn’t that mean that the warp-drive was a success?” Leeson demanded.

“All it means,” said Daviot pedantically, “is that they succeeded in converting from one kind of drive to another. It doesn’t mean that the warp-drive necessarily took them anywhere.”