34 James Blish
Once the glamor wore off it, it became known as a form of suicide-mostly
because we couldn’t think of any way to talk to the volunteers, once they
were in space, without a long time-lag between sentences.”
Ailiss cleared her throat ostentatiously. Ertak ignored her.
“However, the Ertak Effect provides us with the means of communication we
needed. Though alas it isn’t instantaneous, and probably that hope was im-
possible of realization from the beginning, it is at least much faster than
the velocity of light. In fact, it’s better than twenty times as fast,
which is certainly a substantial gain, wouldn’t you say?”
“I was taught that beating light speed was impossible in itself,” Jorn said
faintly.
“So was I. Nothing so irritates me as physics-by-flat. But that’s not all,
Mr. Birn. Shortly after we began to develop the necessary apparatus, we
discovered that the Ertak Effect provides much more than a fast method of
communication over long distances. It can send a physical object just as
well as it can send any other sort of pattern. Both, after all, are simply
problems in information transfer; they differ only in their orders of
complexity. Transforming this implication from theory into hardware took a
long, weary while, but we have now done so.”
He paused expectantly, but Jorn was again quite lost. He could only shake
his head helplessly.
“To be brief, then,” the Director said, “we now have a practicable
interstellar drive.”
“Interstellar?” Jorn whispered slowly. “With … with a ship to go with
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