“But in the DPC-3, I was cut off from the world around me much more severely. I couldn’t look outside the ports I was in overdrive, and there was nothing to see. I couldn’t communicate with home, because I was going faster than light. And then I found I couldn’t move either, for an enormous long while; and that even the instruments that are in constant change for the usual spaceman wouldn’t be in motion for me. Even those were fixed.
“After the time rate began to pick up, I found myself in an even more impossible box. The instruments moved, all right, but then they moved too fast for me to read them.
The whole situation was now utterly rigidand, in effect, I died. I froze as solid as the ship around me, and stayed that way as long as the overdrive was on.”
“By that showing,” Haertel said dryly, “the time effects were hardly your friends.”
“But they were, Adolph. Look. Your engines act on subjective time; they keep it varying along continuous curves from far-too-slow to far-too-fastand, I suppose, back down again. Now, this is a situation of continuous change. It wasn’t marked enough, in the long run, to keep me out of pseudo-death; but it was sufficient to protect me from being obliter-ated altogether, which I think is what happened to Brown and Cellini. Those men knew that they could shut down the overdrive if they could just get to it, and they killed themselves trying. But I knew that I just had to sit and take it and, by my great good luck, your sine-curve time variation made it possible for me to survive.”