His tongue-lashing activated their adrenals. With heightened vigor came self-possession. They glowered but waited alertly.

“Good.” Reymont turned mild and holstered his weapon. “We’ll say no more about this. I realize you’ve had a shock which none of you were prepared psychologically to meet. Nevertheless, we’ve got a problem. And it has a solution, if we can work together. I repeat: if.”

Lindgren had swallowed her weeping. “I think I was supposed to—” she said. He shook his head at her and went on:

“We can’t repair the decelerators because we can’t turn off the accelerators. The reason is, as you’ve been told, at high speeds we must have the force fields of one system or the other to shield us from interstellar gas. So it looks as if we’re bottled in this hull. Well, I don’t like the prospect either, though I believe we could endure it. Medieval monks accepted worse.

“Discussing it in the bridge, however, we got a thought. A possibility of escape, if we have the nerve and determination. Navigation Officer Boudreau ran a preliminary check for me. Afterward we called in Professor Nilsson for an expert opinion.”

The astronomer harrumphed and looked important. Jane Sadler seemed less impressed than others.

“We have a chance of success,” Reymont informed them.

A sound like a wind passed through the assembly. “Don’t make us wait!” cried a young man’s voice.

“I’m glad to see some spirit,” Reymont said. “It’ll have to be kept on a tight rein, though, or we’re finished. To make this as short as I can— afterward Captain Telander and the specialists will go into detail— here’s the idea.”

His delivery might have been used to describe a new method of bookkeeping. “If we can find a region where gas is practically nonexistent, we can safely shut down the fields, and our engineers can go outside and repair the decelerator system. Astronomical data are not as precise as we’d like. However, apparently throughout the galaxy and even in nearby intergalactic space, the medium is too dense. Much thinner out there than here, of course; still, so thick, in terms of atoms struck per second, as to kill us without our protection.

“Now galaxies generally occur in clusters. Our galaxy, the Magellanic Clouds, M31 in Andromeda, and thirteen others, large and small, make up one such group. The volume it occupies is about six million light-years across. Beyond them is an enormously greater distance to the next galactic family. By coincidence, it’s in Virgo too: forty million light-years from here.

“ ’In that stretch, we hope, the gas is thin enough for us not to need shielding.”

Babble tried to break out afresh. Reymont lifted both hands. He actually laughed. “Wait, wait!” he called. “Don’t bother. I know what you want to say. Forty million light-years is impossible. We haven’t the tau for it. A ratio of fifty, or a hundred, or a thousand, does us no good. Agreed. But.”

The last word stopped them. He filled his lungs. “But remember,” he said, “we have no limit on our inverse tau. We can accelerate at a lot more than three gee, too, if we widen our scoopfields and choose a path through sections of this galaxy where matter is dense. The exact parameters we’ve been using were determined by our course to Beta Virginis. The ship isn’t restricted to them. Navigator Bou-dreau and Professor Nilsson estimate we can travel at an average of ten gee, quite likely more. Engineer Fedoroff is reasonably sure the accelerator system can stand that, after certain modifications he knows he can make.