“Don’t forget, we can depend on some of the women too,” Nilsson said.

“Yes. Certainly. Like Ingrid Lindgren.”

“Like her indeed.”

“M-hm. I’m afraid you will have to go rouse her, Elof. We’ve got to assemble our cadre— the unbreakables; the people who understand people— assemble them and plan this thing. Start suggesting names.”

CHAPTER 18

The reaches of space-time cannot be numbered by man’s familiar integers; They cannot even be honestly counted by orders of magnitude. To feel this fact, recapitulate:

Leonra Christine spent most of a year getting within 1 per cent of light velocity. The time aboard was about the same, because the value of tau only began to drop sharply when she was quite near c. During that initial period, she covered half a light-year of space, approximately five trillion kilometers.

Thereafter the decrease became constantly more swift. Aided by the higher acceleration now possible, she required somewhat under two more years, in her own measure, to get about ten light-years from Earth. That was where she met her grief.

The decision being made to seek the Virgo cluster of galaxies, she must gain such a tau that she could bridge the distance in a tolerable shipboard time. At maximum acceleration— a maximum which increased as she traveled— she swung half around the Milky Way and into its heart in a little more than one year. According to the cosmos, it took better than a hundred millennia.

In the Sagittarian clouds, she won a tau which brought her out of her native galaxy in days. Then her people discovered that the vacuum between the family of star groups they were in and the Virgo assemblage at which theirplans were aimed, was not hard enough. They must go beyond the entire clan.

In intergalactic space, Leonora Christine remained able to pile on speed. It took her weeks to fare a couple of million light-years to a chosen neighbor galaxy. Spanning this in hours, she filled herself so full of kinetic energy that she crossed a similar distance in days… and presently she used a week or so to depart from her original cluster and reach another one… through which she passed quite rapidly… She coasted across the almost total emptiness of interclan space; meanwhile her engineers fixed the damaged unit. Although without acceleration, she needed only a pair of her own months to lay two or three hundred million light-years behind her.

The accessible mass of the whole galactic clan that was her goal proved inadequate to brake that velocity.

Therefore she did not try. Instead, she used what she swallowed to drive forward all the faster. She traversed the domain of this second clan— with no attempt at manual control, simply spearing through a number of its member galaxies— in two days.

On the far side, again into hollow space, she fell free. The stretch to the next attainable clan was on the order of another hundred million light-years. She made the passage in about a week.