his stomach, which had become drastically reduced in the last few weeks.
'I'm for grub,' he said. 'What there is of it left, anyway. What do you say, me hearties?'
'None for me,' Zoya said. 'Maybe a drink of water.'
'Zoyishka, you're wasting away,' Yuri said.
'Good for the soul.'
'Not so good for the body, Zoya,' I said. 'You should eat. Come on, we're not on starvation rations yet.'
She shrugged, then looked at me and relented. 'You're right, I should. It's just that my appetite seems to have disappeared. And when I do eat, my digestion is frightful. There's some pain.'
'What about Winnie?' Roland broke in.
The non sequitur brought everyone up short. Carl asked, 'What did you say, Roland?'
'What about Winnie's map?and George's? Isn't it clear by now that they were planted? Maybe there are other races, other borderline-sapient animals who have map knowledge. Thousands, millions of species seeded along the Skyway like that. It all fits.' He ground fist into palm, his lips pursed. He seemed to be off somewhere on his own magic carpet of thought. 'It all fits.'
Yuri was willing to plod back to the previous conversational sequence. 'Yes, that's a distinct possibility, and in fact that's been one of the operating assumptions of our investigation into the matter. But it's also manifestly clear that Winnie and George's so-called knowledge is anything but reliable.'
'Yeah,' I said, 'which brings us back to square one. So quit grinding your teeth, Roland, and relax. It's a safe bet we're not going to get to the bottom of this for some time.'
Roland seemed miffed. 'I wasn't grinding my teeth.'
'Just an expression.' I reached back and slapped his knee 'Take it easy. Okay?'
He unwound a bit and smiled a little sheepishly. 'Sure Sorry.'
'It's okay.'
'I have an announcement,' Sam put in.
'Let's have it,' I told him.
'We've just gone superluminal.'
'What's that?' Susan said.
'Fancy for 'faster than light'.'
Yuri and Zoya exchanged glances. Then a slow, world-weary smile of capitulation spread over Yuri's face. 'Well, we knew the Roadbugs had superscience. Now we know they have magic.'
'Sam, are you sure?'
'Hell, no. I'm not equipped to analyze data like these, but I'm damned if I can explain this crazy stuff any other way. Do you see any stars out there?'
I looked. Blank space. 'Wow. No, I don't.'
'I watched them disappear, but they didn't just disappear, they dopplered right off the scale.'
'What's he saying, Jake?' John asked.
'I have an inkling, maybe.'
'I can't really explain it,' Sam said. 'I don't have the wherewithal to put it into easily understandable terms. Not really in my programming. I can give you figures, but you wouldn't want 'em.'
'Sam,' I said, 'this radiation. I was wondering about that. Even at lightspeed, we'd be smacking into stray hydrogen atoms with terrific energy. It'd fry us. What kind of count are you reading?'
'I'm not getting any high-energy particles, but I'm tracking very high frequency photons, about one per second. Which is nothing, really, in terms of health hazard.'
'You say you're tracking them at faster-than-light speeds?'
'No, no, no, of course not. Light that's faster than light? The situation isn't that crazy yet. What I am saying is that these little buggers used to be starlight.'
'Oh.'
'Here's my hunch. We have just crossed the lightspeed barrier. No hyperspace, no fifth dimension', none of that horse nonsense. We are simply going faster than light.'
'Oh,' I said again, not knowing what else to add.
Susan was befuddled. 'Hey, isn't that supposed to be impossible?'
We all looked at her.
'Just trying to be helpful,' she said lamely.
'Let's eat,' I said.
Our space journey lasted three days. We spent the time pretty much as we had done up till then, eating, sleeping, attending to personal matters, playing cards, playing chess (Sam took us all on in a marathon session?he won hands down against all comers. 'It's not me, it's just my game files,' he said modestly), reading, gabbing, although that tapered off after a while. We had hashed over everything of moment and were running out of small- talk material. We'd decided not to trade life stories. Carl was still reticent on the subject of Everybody-Knew-What, but he said he was working on it.
Sam eventually admitted he had given up trying to make sense of the data he was getting. And pretty soon he wasn't getting anything.
'Nothing out there, I guess,' he said. 'I'm not equipped for radio astronomy, so there's no use even speculating.'
Along about a Tuesday morning… Actually, it was a Tuesday, and it was the fourteenth of March?at least it was back on a little blue planet some billions of light-years away, billions of years in the future, or the past, who knows. Anyway, along about a Tuesday morning we spotted something up ahead. That is, Sam did through the light-amplifier. I looked into the scope. Nothing but a faint smudge of light. Couple hours later, though, it was brighter.
'A star?' I ventured. 'That'd mean we're nonsuperluminal, wouldn't it?'
'I think so. Actually, judging from the blue-shift, I'd say we were strolling along at a little under point nine cee and decelerating.'
'So that's our destination.'
'Well, seeing that there's no other place around the place, I reckon that must be the place… I reckon.'
'Hmph.'
'Except that's no dang star,' Sam said.
'What is it?'
'Beats the living hell out of me.'
I sat back in the driver's seat. 'From what Yuri's been telling us, we're billions of years back in the history of the universe, no telling how many billions. Obviously far enough back so that stars haven't even formed yet. Maybe this is a quasar.'
'No, if you swing that thing to these settings, you'll see something that looks like what a quasar should look like.'
I positioned the scope and looked. A fuzzy blob of light with a faint spike coming out of it came into focus. 'Yeah, that's what they're supposed to look like?some of 'em, anyway. But it should be a lot brighter, shouldn't it? I mean, if we're back when quasars first formed, we should be a hell of a lot closer to them, and…' I sat back. 'Hell, who am I kidding. What I know about astronomy you couldn't stuff a flea with.'
'Maybe it isn't a quasar,' Sam said. 'I was just guessing. Why not ask Yuri?'
'We've been picking his brains for three days now. Zoya's and Oni's, too. They're sleeping.' I thought a moment, then said, 'Yuri told me that if we had the right kind of microwave scoop we could tune in the cosmic background radiation and calculate exactly how far back we are.'
'If we had the right kind of microwave scoop,' Sam snorted. 'Look, this is fun, but another hour and we're gonna be there. So let's wait.'
So we did.
When we first began to see some detail, the strange object looked like a small star cluster with a bright core that was a bit off-center. Then it got very strange. It wasn't a cluster but a perfect sphere of stars with a brilliant spot near the very edge. But here was a problem.
'Those can't be stars,' Sam said. 'We're too close to that thing. They're just points of light.'
