Blue shift! I was traveling so fast that light itself seemed as sluggish as the Doppler-shifted noise of a passing train.

The Qax gave me my head. Probably the ship was fairly immune to accidents... even if I wasn't.

"The Xeelee hyperdrive works on unconventional principles," the Qax told me. "On your return, we're not sure precisely where in our system you'll arrive -- but we know it will be a fixed distance from the sun.

"The mass of the ship and sun are the deciding factors. The more mass the ship has, the closer to the sun you'll be placed."

I flew out to that critical return orbit. I wasn't surprised to find a Spline gunship, pitted with weapons that tracked me like eyes. Around the curve of the orbit was another gunship, and another. I swept out of the ecliptic plane, only to find more gunships. The Qax sun was encased by a sphere of them, completely staking out my return radius. "This must be costing you a fortune," I said. "Why?"

Lipsey said elegantly: "Oh, they're not scared of you, Bolder. But they wouldn't like a hundred armed Xeelee to come swarming out of that ship instead of you, now would they?"

After two months' training I felt ready. I skimmed out to the Spline-guarded radius and closed up my wings. Lipsey, once more alone with the Qax, said gently: "Good luck, Jim Bolder."

"Yeah." I hit the red button--

-- and gasped as the hyperdrive jump made the Qax sun wink to nothingness. Below my feet appeared a compact yellow star, set in a sky crowded with stars and dust. I became aware of a trickle of clicks and pops as instruments clustered around me began to study the hurtling wonders.

"Wow!" I said.

"Bolder," said the Qax, "skip the epithets and report."

"I think I'm near the center of the Galaxy."

"Good. That is--"

-- another jump--

" -- according to plan."

"Lethe." The yellow sun had disappeared; now I hovered below a dumbbell-shaped binary pair. Great tongues of golden starstuff arced between the twin stars. The sky was darker; I must be passing through the Galaxy and out the other side--

-- jump--

-- and now I was suspended below the plane of the Galaxy itself; it was a Sistine ceiling of orange and blue, the contrasts surprisingly sharp--

-- jump--

-- and these jumps were coming faster; I watched a dwarf star scour its way over the surface of its huge red parent and that dim disc over there must be my Galaxy--

-- jump--

-- and now I was inside a massive star, actually within its pinkish flesh, but before I could cry out there was another--

-- jump--

-- and--

-- jump -- jump -- jumpjumpjumpjump--

I closed my eyes. There was no inward sensation of motion; only a flickering outside my eyelids that told me of skies being ripped aside like veils.

"...Bolder! Can you hear me? Bolder--"