The puppeteer groped for words. “If you turned on the reaction motors and the hyperdrive together, the flames would precede your ship through hyperspace.”

I got the picture then. Ass backward into the unknown. With the control room at the ship’s bottom, it made sense. To a puppeteer, it made sense.

III

And I was off.

I went up under two standard gees because I like my comfort. For twelve hours I used only the reaction motors. It wouldn’t do to be too deep in a gravity well when I used a hyperdrive, especially an experimental one. Pilots who do that never leave hyperspace. The relaxroom kept me entertained until the bell rang. I slipped down to the control room, netted myself down against free-fall, turned off the motors, rubbed my hands briskly together, and turned the hyperdrive.

It wasn’t quite as I’d expected.

I couldn’t see out, of course. When the hyperdrive goes on, it’s like your blind spot expanding to take in all the windows. It’s not just that you don’t see anything; you forget that there’s anything to see. If there’s a window between the kitchen control bank and your print of Dali’s Spain, your eye and mind will put the picture right next to the kitchen bank, obliterating the space between. It takes getting used to, in fact it has driven people insane, but that wasn’t what bothered me. I’ve spent thousands of man-hours in hyperspace. I kept my eye on the mass pointer.

The mass pointer is a big transparent sphere with a number of blue lines radiating from the center. The direction of the line is the direction of a star; its length shows the star’s mass. We wouldn’t need pilots if the mass pointer could be hooked into an autopilot, but it can’t. Dependable as it is, accurate as it is, the mass pointer is a psionic device. It needs a mind to work it. I’d been using mass pointers for so long that those lines were like real stars.

A star came toward me, and I dodged around it. I thought that another line that didn’t point quite straight ahead was long enough to show dangerous mass, so I dodged. That put a blue dwarf right in front of me. I shifted fast and looked for a throttle. I wanted to slow down.

Repeat, I wanted to slow down.

Of course there was no throttle. Part of the puppeteer research project would be designing a throttle. A long fuzzy line reached for me: a protosun…