Out of all this emerged the standard § ship; a full-sized vessel with a crew of thousands and a drive that could take it anywhere. Such a ship was the Jocasta; her velocity was governed by logarithmic ratio. The number of hours in which she accelerated could be taken as the exponent of that power of 10 required to express her speed in miles per hour. Thus when the ship’s § clock registered 2, it meant that the drive had been functioning for two hours and that the speed of the ship relative to her starting point was 102, or one hundred miles per hour.

Oh, yes, Aton thought, as his capsule banked and spun, the § ships started slowly. But 8.83 on the ship’s clock was faster than the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second. Thirteen on the clock represented a full light-year per hour, and 16 was the signal to begin deceleration, since the drive could not be disengaged while any number showed on the clock and higher speed would fling the ship out of the galaxy.

A day and a half, objective Earth time, could take such a ship anywhere in the galaxy.

The capsule slowed, bringing Aton’s mind back to practical matters. It pushed through the seal, re-entering normal pressure. His journey, whether of rods or of light-years, was over.

Five

Captain Moyne was waiting impatiently for him. He had never met her before in person, but it was not possible to mistake her. She was a handsome woman of indeterminate age, sleek and severe in the merchant service uniform. Her lips were almost colorless; her hair was bound in a tight skullcap and hidden under her helmet. Her face showed no trace of the ravage of twenty-four years in space. She was cordially disliked by the crew: a dislike she cultivated assiduously.

Why was she alone? An emergency should have the officers of the ship flocking impotently about her. And what was she doing in an obscure cargo hold?

“Five,” she said without preamble. “Seven’s refrigerant has broken down. We have thirty minutes, no more.”

Aton followed her to the hold. “Captain, I think you ordered the wrong man. I’m a machinist.”

She broke open a locker with practiced competence and removed a set of space suits. “I have the right man.”

“Look, I can’t fix a cooling system with press and die—”

The Captain whirled and caught his shirt with a slender hand. She yanked the fastenings open, reached inside, flipped out a thin booklet hidden in an inside pocket. “Is this not an illegal copy of the ship’s lay roster?” she asked.

She had him. Prosecution on that score would net him two years in prison and a lifetime proscription against space employment. The lay roster of a merchant ship was a classified document.

“You’re the captain, Captain,” he said.

She flung a suit at him. “Put this on.”

He hesitated. His heavy coveralls would not fit inside the light suit.