I DO NOT KNOW HOW. YOU WILL HAVE TO ARRIVE AT THE EXPLANATION UNAIDED. THIS CANNOT BE DONE, it replied.
He wrote, with morbid curiosity:
IF YOU DO NOT FIND THE ANSWER UNAIDED YOU WILL BE DESTROYED ALONG
WITH ME AT 13:53. DON'T YOU GIVE A DAMN?
It answered: GIVE A DAMN IS A SEMANTIC EXPRESSION I DO NOT UNDERSTAND. CLARIFY QUESTION.
He got out of the computer seat and walked about the room restlessly. He passed by the transdimensional viewscreen and communicator and pressed the communicator's signal button. A dial flickered in return, showing his signal was going out, but there was no sound in response. If only he could make contact with the brains in Observation—
He was umpty billion miles east of the sun and umpty billion miles west of the sun. He was racing faster than light in two different directions at once and he was sitting motionless under the blasters of two Slug cruisers.
Another thought came to him: even if he could move the ship while in the warp, where could he go?
He would have to go far beyond the outer limits of the solar system to escape detection by the Slug cruisers. And at that distance the sun would be only a yellow star, incapable of energizing the little solar power units. He would not live long after the last of the power was drained from the batteries and the air regeneration equipment ceased functioning. He would not even dare sleep, toward the last. There were no convection currents in the air of a ship without gravity, and it was imperative that the air be circulated constantly. The air circulation blowers would cease functioning while the ship still contained pure air but he would have to move about continually to breathe that air. Should he lie down to sleep he would smother to death in a carbon dioxide bubble of his own making.
If he managed to emerge into normal space at some point just outside Earth's atmosphere, beyond range of the cruisers, his driveless ship would descend as a blazing meteor. If, by some miracle, he could emerge into normal space just a few inches above the space-field it would be to materialize into space already occupied by air. Such a materialization would be simultaneously fatal to him and to the electronic components of the shuttle and computer.
And if he did not move the ship, the Slug cruisers would disintegrate him. He had four hypothetical choices of his way to die, all equally unpleasant.
He smiled wanly at his reflection in the bright metal bordering the viewscreen and said, 'Brother—you've had it!'
* * *
He went to the control room, there to brush his fingers across the useless control buttons and look into the viewscreen that revealed only black and limitless Nothing.
What was the warp? Surely it must have definite physical laws of some kind. It was difficult to imagine any kind of existence—even the black nothing of the warp—as being utterly without rule or reason. If he knew the laws of the warp he might find some means of survival hitherto hidden from him. There was only one way he could learn about the warp. He would have to question the computer and continue questioning it until he learned or until his time was up.
He returned to the computer and considered his next question. The computer had calculated their positions from observations of the sun and other stars in front of the ship—what would similar calculations based on observations of the stars behind the ship reveal? He typed: USE FIRST THE TRIANGULATION METHOD AND THEN THE SPECTRUM-SHIFT METHOD
TO DETERMINE OUR POSITION FROM OBSERVATIONS MADE OF THE STARS OF
OPHIUCHUS.
The answers appeared. They showed the ship to be simultaneously speeding away from Ophiuchus and toward it.
He asked: DO THESE TWO POSITIONS COINCIDE WITH THOSE RESULTING FROM THE
OBSERVATIONS OF ORION?
YES, it answered.
Was the paradox limited to the line of flight?
He asked the computer: WHAT IS OUR POSITION, COURSE AND SPEED AS INDICATED BY
THE STARS AT RIGHT-ANGLES TO OUR FORWARD-BACKWARD COURSE; BY THE
