docks. Rick found Hague in the backyard feeding the squirrels. "Yes, yes, Margaret, here's some for you. No, no, Fred, that piece is for Thompson. Yes, here is some cracker for you, Fred, oh yes." At the moment there were seven or eight squirrels crowding around Hague as he knelt on the ground. He had names for at least thirty squirrels now, and insisted that he could tell them all apart.

Arie Hague had taken to Earth with the same delight he had previously reserved for machines.The phone buzzed and Rick left Hague with his squirrels to answer. It was Bob."I'm a half hour out, Rick. I just wanted to let someone know. And did you talk to your dad yet?""Yeah.""Yeah . . . ? Well, what did he say about Arie?""You've grown fond of the little guy, haven't you?" Rick accused, echoing his father, then told Bob what his dad had said. * * * That evening they were sitting out on the back porch of the beach house, except for Hague, who was doing his seven P.M. feeding of the squirrels. "No, no, Matilda, that one is for Francis, yes, for Francis.

Here's one for you. Good, Matilda. Good, good, good."

"The man has fallen in love with animals, I think," Bob said, gesturing to Hague down in the grass on all

fours, handing out nuts to upwards of twenty squirrels, all scurrying around him, but sometimes going off in a game of tag.

"I hope it's not too hard for him to give them up for a while when he returns to the Moon," Rick said.

"Chris is coming down tomorrow morning to be with him on the trip back. Of course, we'll be gone by then."

"He'll do okay. Arie isn't the same guy I pulled out of that asteroid-hell, it was only a few months ago. Time sure flies when you're having a war. Anyway, he's grown a lot. You can tell. He might have turned out almost normal if it hadn't been so valuable to allow him to completely indulge his talents. But I think there's hope for him yet."

Another squirrel scampered out of the woods and up to Arie Hague. This one was noticeably yellower than the others, a blond in the midst of brunettes. "Welcome, Sarobi, welcome. Yes, yes, twice as much for you for all the times you fed me, yes, oh yes, oh yes."

"Sarobi?" Bob wondered. " 'All the times you fed me'?" he repeated, puzzled.

"His sister," Rick said. "The first time he mentioned her I questioned him about her, but they were separated when he was six. Apparently something killed their parents and she took care of him for a while, then she set off for Earth. His story gets fuzzy after that. I got my dad to promise to try to find out what happened to her."

Bob got up from his chair and stood looking at the trees, listening to the soft breeze rustle the leaves. Having been born on the Moon, Earth was almost as novel for him as it was for Hague. Bob went down the two steps to the ground and kneeled down next to him, took some nuts out of the bag, and stuck his hand out toward the nearest squirrel, who promptly accepted the reward with no regard to the owner of the hand. Four more squirrels came over to the lieutenant, plainly expecting similar treatment.

"You little beggars," Bob said, but he got some more out. Then he stood up and turned to Rick still sitting on the porch. "I was just thinking of something. I remember Chris telling me how much he liked to watch the squirrels play at his house. Did you ever see his place?"

"Just pictures in his biography," Rick said.

"It was a beautiful home, up there on the side of that mountain. I picked Chris up from there when I took him up to the Moon to join the Phinon Project. I was just recalling what he said after he ordered the house to lock itself up. 'That should hold her until I return,' " Nachtegall said in a fair impersonation of Dykstra's voice. " 'That is, if I return. At my age you never know.' And I said I was sure he'd be returning." The lieutenant paused for a moment as if thinking real hard.

"Why did you think about that?" Rick asked finally.

"Up until now I've just taken it for granted that we'll be coming back from this mission. I just hope I'm righter about that than I was about Chris going back to his house."

There was silence around them, except for the chattering of squirrels and the distant wash of waves up on the shore, then Rick said softly: "So do I, Bob. So do I."

They left Hague sleeping as they got into the ground car at three in the morning. A guard would wait with the little scientist until Dykstra arrived. A driver took them to the entrance to the black docks, and after a short tube trip they arrived at the bay where the Hyperlight was awaiting her maiden voyage.

There was no fanfare at all, and the only recording of the departure of humanity's first FTL craft would come from the security monitors. Bob and Rick boarded the ship and the lieutenant sealed the doors from the pilot's bubble.

"Have any fancy words to say?" Bob asked.

"Not I," Rick said. "I'm too sleepy. But I'll have plenty of fancy words to say once we get back."

Bob cleared their departure with the lone technician and they felt the gentle bump as the pad the Hyperlight rested on was lifted up into the hangar dome, which was on the bottom of Lake Michigan, under 170 meters of water.

"Shields on," Bob said, then the dome split and water poured in. With the shields up, they formed a buoyant bubble which rapidly rose to the surface, and in a transition so smooth Rick didn't feel it, Bob hit the repulsors the instant they broke the surface and the Hyperlight climbed rapidly into the dark sky, breaking through the cloud deck in less than a minute, then climbing toward the stars on her atmosphere jets. Once at 30 kilometers' altitude, Bob cut in the converted streakbomber's original reaction drive and they thrust out of the atmosphere.

"What would happen if I used the reactionless drive in the atmosphere?" Bob asked. "I was just told not to, but not why. Did you guys ever try it during the tests?"

"Sure did," Rick said. "On a test bed aboard a barge out in the middle of the lake. It works, but it sounded like bagpipe music being played at three times the normal speed and 150 decibels. We haven't had time to figure out exactly why that is, but it seemed better just not to use the drive in the atmosphere."

Bob was both pilot and navigator, and Rick was of necessity the engineer. What their titles would mean once they were beyond the confines of the Solar System, however, was anybody's guess.

"Okay, we're almost at the blind spot," Bob said. He was referring to a position within Earth's shadow from where their switching to the reactionless drive was least likely to be noticed by probes and scanners from the Belt. "On my mark, five seconds to drive engagement. Mark. Five, four, three, two . . ."

"One" and "now" went unspoken as Bob flipped the switches, shutting off the regular engines and activating the new drive. The response was instant, and heartening in its smoothness, as Bob ramped the acceleration up past forty, fifty, even sixty gees.

"I don't feel a thing," Bob said. "Good compensation fields, guy."

"The best," Rick said. "They have to be or we couldn't begin to approach the maximum potential of this drive. Up around 92 gees or so we lose perfect compensation. The next ten-gee increase will result in us feeling about one-and-a-quarter gees of acceleration. After 120 gees every one gee increase will be felt as one gee, but you'd pass out before we got that high. And this ship would start to fall apart beyond 140 gravities." He was particularly proud of the compensation fields. He'd done his doctoral work on the theory of their construction, and it was the one thing he'd worked on in the outfitting of the Hyperlight that Dr. Hague had not improved upon. Much.

"Okay, we're heading south to Fort Conger Station and our flight plan calls for us to be there in four days. Let's make ourselves comfortable."

Despite the uniqueness of their craft, the journey out to Fort Conger Station was uneventful. They had to maintain communications silence so they had no messages to send, and there wasn't much of anything permeating the ether out so far south of the sun worth listening to. Rick and Bob spent a good deal of time continuing the chess match they'd begun in the beach house, and after 58 games, Rick was up by two. They also spent much of their time reading up on the Phinons. Chris had downloaded the entire Phinon file to the ship's library-which by itself could have gotten the old genius thrown in the brig-because he wasn't certain of which information the men would find useful.

One day out from the station, Rick came forward and interrupted Bob. "So, are you finally going to tell me who this third person is who's supposed to join us? Chris didn't tell me, so you have to know."

"I think you've already met him. He's that old commander, the black guy, who brought the Phinon FTL engine to the Moon from Slingshot. His name is Roger Tykes. Chris says he served with Sammi's husband out there. I don't know how Chris talked him into joining us, but he wanted as few to know about it as need be until we actually got off Earth."

"I did meet him briefly. Boy, secrets like this make me feel like a spy," Rick said.

"Think 'traitor.' That's exactly what some in the Patrol are going to think if they catch on to what we're doing."

The Hyperlight crossed the Hague Limit with barely a ripple in space-time, though Rick claimed that his instruments showed exactly when the transition took place, and decelerated into a parking orbit around the wisp of an artificial world that was Fort Conger Station. After one revolution tractor beams pulled them into the hangar and placed them in the special berth that had been built for the ship. So far, they hadn't deviated one iota from the official mission plan.

They debarked from the ship and were met by the station commander; he wore no insignia since the station was civilian owned. "Welcome," the man said. "I am Mr. Benton Booker. Dr. Vander Kam, I assured your father that we'd provide you two with the best rooms the station has to offer. Unfortunately, the best are barely better than the worst."

"Good thing it's only for one night, then," Rick said.

Just then Pops, who was wearing his insignia of a System Patrol commander, entered the hangar followed closely by a very attractive woman in a jumpsuit that did nothing to hide the outlines of the fine form inside. "Let me introduce you to Commander Roger Tykes and technician Paula Eriksen. They are the ones who've been doing most of the proxy field testing out here."

"Try all of the field testing, Booker," Paula said, not shy about setting the record straight.

"Okay, you can have Sammi," Bob whispered to Rick. "I'll take her instead."

"I don't know what the hell you're talking about," Rick shot back.

They both shut up when Booker had them all go through the usual hand-shaking. Much to Bob's annoyance, Paula barely gave him a glance and seemed somewhat fixated on Rick. "I've been eagerly waiting for you to get here, Dr. Vander Kam. I've wanted to discuss the ins and outs of the hyperdrive engine with you. Even though I've been intimately involved with constructing the test unit out here, I don't really know anything about the theory behind it."

"I'll do my best," Rick said, obviously bewildered, and delighted, by the attention.

"She's doing her best," Bob muttered under his breath. "Gold digger."

"What was that, Lieutenant?" Pops asked, suddenly standing right in front of Bob.

"Just clearing my throat, Commander. We're in for quite a treat for pilots, aren't we? But I have dibs on the pilot's seat when we first do hyperdrive."

"That's fine with me, Lieutenant Nachtegall. Just jockeying a ship driven by Dykstra-Hague impellers is about all my tired old heart can take," Pops said.

"Don't mind him and that tired old soldier bit, Bob. He'd cut your throat out from his death bed if you didn't salute him when you entered the room," Paula interjected.

"You say the nicest things," Pops said, rolling his eyes.

"What was that you called the new drive?" Bob asked.

"We all call it the 'Dykstra-Hague impeller.' What have you been calling it?"

" 'The new drive.' "

After a bit it was time to be shown to their quarters. Booker and the others took Bob and Rick in tow. So these are the three who will make history, Bob thought on the way, surveying the group. Rick, the young but brilliant engineer; Pops, the wizened old soldier; and himself, the hotshot pilot out to prove his worth. Tomorrow they would do something that had never been done before.

He knew Dykstra would want him to bear in mind how history would judge them. * * * The same group had dinner together that night, then afterwards Pops took Bob into the labs because he had something interesting to show him. He'd wanted Rick to come along, too, but Paula had already spirited him away to discuss "the physical, er, physics." "This is it," Pops said, as he pulled the tarp off a tangled, smashed cylinder of metal and peculiar electronics and stretched and kinked coils.

"So, you're an artist. Late twentieth century style, right?" Bob said as he looked over the mess before him. Pops smiled at the joke. "That's right. I call this one, 'Single Unit Hyperdrive Engine After Impacting Hague Limit While Activated.' ""Holy shit," Bob said. "Looks like it's been turned inside out.""Oh, it was. But through a hyperdimension," Pops said. "Just remember, Lieutenant. When we return we'll be the only two humans in the Solar System who know how to fly through hyperspace, so let's not try to come out too close to the Limit."

Bob looked over the wreckage again. "We're on the same screen on that," he said.

Meanwhile, in the small observation/lounge/bar on the top level of the station, Rick was discussing hyperphysics with Paula while trying not to notice the fine example of a non-Euclidean geometric surface on Paula's chest that she seemed not remotely shy about displaying. Instead, he tried to keep his eyes looking outward, through the dome and at the myriad of stars bejeweling the black satin, and at the splash of diamond dust that was the Milky Way.

"Anyway," he said, "once you activate the hyperdrive, there is a finite amount of time that it takes for the ship to make the transition from our space to hyperspace, and this appears as a two hundred million gee acceleration. The streak of light that we record is caused by photons actually created by the deforming of space-time. It's our biggest energy waster, but using two drive units reduces the losses tremendously."

He glanced Paula's way again, briefly, and saw that she still seemed to be listening in rapt attention. Rick was not unused to having women pretend to listen to him since it was no secret who his father was. The problem with Paula was that even if she was only with him now because of his family background, she might still be interested in the conversation because of her own.

"Of course, after the transition interval is over, the ship winds up in hyperspace moving along at almost exactly twenty-four times lightspeed, depending on your momentum vector."

"Why is that, Rick?" Paula asked through a dazzling smile. Or had he been drinking too much? Which drink was this one, anyway?

"Well, hyperspace is a continuum like normal space is. Our space has a velocity width of around three hundred million meters per second. Hyperspace one has a width of about fifteen million mps, except that 'zero' is 24c. If you turned on your reaction engines in hyperspace, you could actually increase your velocity, and you'd notice the change in kinetic energy once you transitioned back down. But when you're going a light-year in fifteen days, it just wouldn't be worth the fuel."

"I get it," Paula said. "But what did you mean by 'hyperspace one'?"

"There are many levels of hyperspace it turns out. Once we have the technology to hit level two, we can move something like a light-year an hour. That's about warp eight in Star Trek talk. You familiar with the show?"

"I took a class on it in college," Paula said.

"At level three we're talking Skylark of Space."

This time when Rick looked at Paula he noticed that look in her eyes, and that she must have just moistened her lips. There had been music playing in the background in the lounge the whole time, but now an instrumental version of "Waltzing on the Mountains of the Moon" began, one of the most infectious dance melodies of the last fifty years.

"I'd love it if you'd dance with me," Paula said.

The Hyperlight isn't the only thing capable of hyperdrive out here, Rick thought as he rose, took her hand, and led her out on the dance floor. They had just started when he noticed Bob and Pops enter. He nodded to them, noted Bob's leer in return and that Pops had rolled his eyes, then relaxed as Paula melted closer to him.

Bob and Pops took seats at a table near the back, well away from the bar, and ordered drinks. Bob decided on Irish coffee but was surprised when Pops ordered scotch-straight and neat. "You can drink that stuff at room temperature?" Bob asked.

"Can ye not also, laddie? I divvn't think I wish to gan oot amangst the stors wi' no nancies," Pops replied.

Bob dropped that topic and nodded toward Paula and Rick. "What about her, Pops? She hitting on him for his money or what?"

"It drives you right up the wall that she's with him and not you, doesn't it? Face it, Lieutenant-you're just a pilot in the Patrol. He's not only rich, he's brilliant. She could go after him for his money or his brains. Then again, maybe she just likes the cut of his jib."

"His what?"

"Never mind. Paula's a little mouthy, and maybe she would enjoy a little fling with the Capitol Products heir, but if he doesn't capture her heart, she'd drop it," Pops said, then polished off his drink in one swift motion.

Just then Mr. Booker came into the lounge. He had an urgent look in his eye. He looked around, nodded to Pops and Bob, then gestured to Rick still out on the dance floor. "Dr. Vander Kam, I need you to come with me right now." Bob saw Rick look at Paula, shrug, then watched, jealously, as Paula pulled Rick to her and kissed him before letting him come to join them. Booker was already at the table by the time Rick got there.

"What's all this about, Benton?" Pops asked.

"Your mission schedule is changed. You're leaving as soon as I can get you all on your ship. Now let's get out of here and I'll explain on the way to the hangar."

Bob rose then made a move to finish his drink. Booker stopped his hand and forced the glass back onto the table. Bob was surprised-Booker had not seemed like he had that much steel in his spine.

Pops said: "He used to be General Booker, Lieutenant."

The group hurried down the hall to the hangar bay. "Our trackers picked up a Dinosaur-class battleship on its way here and we weren't expecting one, particularly since no one except a few folks in System Patrol Intelligence are even supposed to know we're out here."

"What do they want?" Rick asked.

"We're pretending we don't hear their hails, but I assume they've figured out what you gentlemen are planning to do."

"You know, too?" Pops asked.

"I think the good Doctor Dykstra has called in most of the favors he's accumulated in his long life. I'll still owe him a few after this," Booker said.

They arrived in the bay and the Hyperlight was ready, bright, shiny, and beautiful. "Get going, men," Booker said. "Godspeed and all that. Bring us back some Phinons."

Pops' gear was sitting at the foot of the ramp, Booker having had it brought from the commander's quarters. His power suit had been stashed away earlier. Pops grabbed his gear on the way into the ship. The others followed.

Bob dropped into the pilot's seat and Pops took the seat beside him. "Strap in, boys," Bob said. "We're off in ten seconds."

The hangar doors opened and they lifted and zipped through the air dam. "Compensation fields balanced. Drive engaged," Bob said, and they shot off at 40 gees.