“No, but…”

“All right, quiet!” Jesperson said, as if detecting the growing annoyance on the Technarch’s face. “We’ll find out the story in twenty minutes.”

“But the Technarch wanted to know…” Daviot began, and let the sentence come to a dying fall.

McKenzie turned away. They were near the roof of a great transparent dome that covered hundreds of acres. Outside, on the spacefield, the temperature was stifling even now, in the morning’s small hours. Within, silent conditioners maintained a more livable climate.

The Technarch looked up and out. The clear desert air, utterly transparent, yielded a magnificent view of the heavens. Stars speckled the black sky like gleaming jewels; above, the full moon cast its brightness over the field. Men raced busily over the field’s seared surface, readying it for the ship that was plunging down toward Australia from the sky.

McKenzie felt a constriction in his throat, another in the pit of his stomach. It irritated him to be so tense, but no stern command could relax him.

In twenty minutes—nineteen—eighteen—the XV-ftl would be returning.

He looked at the stars. Hundreds, thousands of them, sprinkled across the sky. Every star within a radius of four hundred light-years that bore a habitable planet—and that was most of them—had been reached by humanity. For centuries now, ships traveling at nine-tenths of the speed of light had coursed outward to the stars, prisoned by the limiting velocity but still capable of eating up the parsecs, given enough time. It had taken six years to make the first one-way trip to the Centauri system; the return, via transmat, was all but instantaneous.

But you had to reach the stars before you could plant the transmat pickup there, and that was the stumbling-block. Ever outward, by little hops, the empire of Man expanded— but always hampered by the inexorable mathematical limits of the known universe. Once a planet could be reached and linked in the interstellar transmat network, it was as close to Earth as any other point within the network. The transmat gave infinite connectivity—once the link had been established. But until then…