The § drive—more properly called the F.T.L. (Faster Than Light drive)—whose discovery dated man’s nova-like fling into space, was more of an effect than a science. Professor Feetle, the smiling legend said, had discovered it one day as he eased himself into his villa pool. As the water rose to accommodate his descending corpulence, an apple flew over the roof and bounced on his head. His poolside recorder, triggered into action by the key words “displacement” and “gravity,” faithfully monitored the ensuing harangue. In due course this excerpt was transcribed by the robot-secretary, who made tasteful substitutions for frequent blasphemous expressions and references to neighboring juveniles, and forwarded the product to a technical bulletin whose robot-editor printed the report verbatim. Fifteen freelance research companies attempted to construct the device outlined. Twelve gave it up within a year, two discovered serendipitous side effects and forgot about the original specification, and the last had a diode misconnected by an incompetent robot-employee and came up with §.

At first the device was not recognized as anything more than a perpetual-motion machine. It was bald and corpulent and tended to run around in circles while emitting angry squeals. An inquiry to Professor Feetle brought a furious suit for character assassination. Tested in space, it accelerated from an initial impetus of something less than an inch per second to something less than a foot per second in the course of an hour. During the second hour it attained a velocity several times as great. Eventually it caromed with such vigor that only instruments could track it. Finally it disappeared: although it had never left its self-determined orbit, it was gone.

Almost gone: the instruments picked up strange trace radiation—Cherenkov rays, the wake left by an impulse that exceeds the speed of light through a given medium. In this case the medium was a virtually perfect vacuum.

Professor Feetle withdrew his suit and took an active interest in his creation. But after that, the legend continued less benignly, censorship cast its mantle over the proceedings. It was rumored that the § device, once activated, drew its power from some unknown source—some power limitless in nature; that ships were constructed around large § devices and sent into some limbo that light itself was too coarse to penetrate; that not all of these ships returned; that there were malignant ghosts in far space, or non-space.