So progress had been slow. After better than four centuries of interstellar travel, mankind had colonized every habitable world within a sphere of four hundred light-years’ radius. It was reasonable to assume that the pattern of that sphere held true for the rest of the galaxy: at least one habitable but uninhabited Earth-type planet round every main sequence sun. No other intelligent life-form had ever been discovered; the universe belonged to man—but it would be millennia before man could take possession.

That fact had irked McKenzie during his years of training for the Archonate; and when the death of Technarch Bengstrom raised McKenzie to the dais, he bent all of Earth’s energies to the task of devising some means of cheating the chains of relativity.

There were failures, expensive ones. Test ships had been sent out and monitored and followed by manned ships, and the manned ships had exploded or never returned. And still there were volunteers for the next ship, and the next, and the one after that…

Until the advent of Daviot-Leeson Drive, with its incredibly slender generator smashing a hole in space-time by controlled thermonuclear thrusts—and suddenly the way seemed clear. Space in the region of a star, reasoned Daviot and Leeson, is warped and distorted by the star’s mass and heat. If only the same effect could be duplicated in miniature, if only a wedge could be opened in the space-time fabric wide enough for a ship to slip through, travel a predetermined course, and return—then man’s dominion would be boundless.

It took six years from the first pilot models to the confidence that allowed McKenzie to send a manned ship to the stars. And now it was returning—in thirteen minutes, twelve, eleven. Minutes ticked tensely away, no one spoke. Jesperson, wearing headphones, was in contact with the main monitoring station at the far end of the field.