Dorothy smiled. “We like living, Edgar.”
“Speaking of ‘Einstein effect’,” broke in Hartnett, “I presume you realize by now that all the weird things we saw were enormously distorted. The stars, for example, were never actually closer. That was easy to realize, because no more than the customary amount of light was visible, and no gravitational eccentricities were noted.”
“What about the thing that nearly wiped us out?” asked Bob Vickers.
“A meteor—and a very small one at that. It landed a little distance away from the ship. Had it hit us, it wouldn’t have blotted us out, but could have caused considerable damage nonetheless.”
“And the—creatures?”
“Microscopic. Had we been able to move at the time, we could have ploughed right through them. I’ve seen those illusions a number of times—we wasted quite a bit of ammunition on them before we got wise.
“And just imagine their consternation when they saw us, apparently microscopic, too, yet always out of grasp. That’s why the cone-creature was flailing away at nothing at all. It was trying to catch us.”
“Can you explain wave n?” burst in Edgar.
“I have seven pages on that in my book,” smiled Hartnett. “Summed up, I say: wave n was discovered while we were looking for something else. We played around with it until it began to sit up and say ‘uncle.’ We don’t know from nothing about it.”
Nick puzzled. “What kind of a book is this, Steve?”