“We’re moving,” he said positively, “and going interstellar too. They’ve turned on the star-drive.”
“You mean we are breaking through into sub-space and will soon experience the terrible wrenching at every fiber of our being?”
“No, they don’t use the old sub-space drive any more, because though a lot of ships broke through into sub-space with a fiber-wrenching jerk, none of them have yet broke back out. I read in the Trooper’s Times where some mathematician said that there had been a slight error in the equations and that time was different in sub-space, but it was different faster not different slower, so that it will be maybe forever before those ships come out.”
“Then we’re going into hyper-space?”
“No such thing.”
“Or we’re being dissolved into our component atoms and recorded in the memory of a giant computor who thinks we are somewhere else so there we are?”
“Wow!” Tembo said, his-eyebrows crawling up to his hairline. “For a Zoroastrian farm boy you have some strange ideas! Have you been smoking or drinking something I don’t know about?”
“Tell me!” Bill pleaded. “If it’s not one of them-what is it? We’re going to have to cross interstellar space to fight the Chingers. How are we going to do it?”
“It’s like this.” Tembo looked around to make sure that First Class Spleen was out of sight, then put his cupped hands together to form a ball. “You make believe that my hands are the ship, just floating in space. Then the Bloater Drive is turned on-”
“The what?”
“The Bloater Drive. It’s called that because it bloats things up. You know, everything is made up of little bitty things called electrons, protons, neutrons, trontrons, things like that, sort of held together by a kind of binding energy. Now, if you weaken the energy that holds things together-I forgot to tell you that also they are spinning around all the time like crazy, or maybe you already knew-you weaken the energy, and because they are going around so fast all the little pieces start to move away from each other, and the weaker the energy the farther apart they move. Are you with me so far?”
“I think I am, but I’m not sure that I like it.”
“Keep cool. Now-see my hands? As the energy gets weaker the ship gets bigger,” he moved his hands further apart. “It gets bigger and bigger until it is as big as a planet, then as big as a sun then a whole stellar system. The Bloater Drive can make us just as big as we want to be, then it’s turned the other way and we shrink back to our regular size and there we are.”
“Where are we?”
“Wherever we want to be,” Tembo answered patiently.
Bill turned away and industriously rubbed shine-o onto a fuse as First Class Spleen sauntered by, a suspicious glint in his eye. As soon as he had turned the corner, Bill leaned over and hissed at Tembo.
“How can we be anywhere else than where we started? Getting bigger, getting smaller doesn’t get us anyplace.”
“Well, they’re pretty tricky with the old Bloater Drive. The way I heard it it’s like you take a rubber band and hold one end in each hand. You don’t move your left hand, but you stretch the band out as far as it will go with your right hand. When you let the band shrink back again you keep your right hand steady and let go with your left. See? You never moved the rubber band, just stretched it and let it snap-but it has moved over. Like our ship is doing now. It’s getting bigger, but in one direction. When the nose reaches wherever we are going the stern will be wherever we were. Then we shrink, and bangol there we are. And you can get into heaven just that easily, my son, if only …” “Preaching on government time, Tembol” First Class Spleen howled from the other side of the fuse rack over which he was looking with a mirror tied to the end of a rod. “I’ll have you polishing fuse clips for a year. You’ve been warned before.”