“I can’t go to a particular time without a path. But in this case, once I get us facing the right direction, I’ll simply slice my way backward as fast as possible, like closing my eyes and throwing us all into a time before space travel. Preferably before telescopes. Once we get there, we can figure out when we are.”

“Close your eyes and jump,” suggested Ram Odin. “Like Icarus learning to fly.”

“Icarus fell to earth, burning, as I remember from my reading in Odinfold,” said Noxon. “That is the legend you were referring to, right?”

“Just trying to think what people on Earth will think of this new, fast-moving star.”

“Once we get back to the right direction,” said Noxon, “I don’t actually care much about what people on Earth think of us. We’ll be visible here for a second or so, but no longer. Maybe nobody will be looking, but there are bound to be instruments that register our presence.”

“They’ll call it a computer glitch,” said the expendable. “It happens all the time. And since the ship won’t be there for them to discover, I’m betting that nobody will suggest that what they saw was a ship moving backward in time that flipped directions and then threw itself backward like a child diving into a swimming pool.”

“Because that would be insane,” agreed Noxon.

“Maybe this is a better plan than the original one,” said Ram Odin. “The distance from the surface of Earth to L5 is actually farther than from the surface of Earth to the near surface of the Moon. It’s safer to move an object the size of this ship when we’re not all that close to Earth and its corrosive atmosphere.”

“I never really understood how far things were in space,” said Noxon. “I knew I could sense paths that were much farther away than I could actually see. But distances on a planet’s surface are trivial compared to distances in space.”

“Words like ‘near’ and ‘far’ take on completely different meanings out here,” said Ram Odin. “Just the fact that I say ‘out here’ instead of ‘up here’ shows something. On a mountain, you’re up high. But in space, you’re far away, you’re outside.”

“So I was naive to think I could find a two-hundred-year-old path from space,” said Noxon. “But what if I hadn’t spent all those months working with Param to figure out how to back-slice? I’d be helpless now. Umbo might have done it, because he doesn’t need paths, but until Param and I trained each other, I couldn’t have done it.”

“Then it’s a good thing you took the time to learn,” said Ram Odin.

“Just do it,” said a mouse. “Slice us on into the past, please, so we can get moving in the right direction.”