"What do we do with this ship? Let's burn her out, huh?" asked Van Buskirk.
"Not on Tuesdays—the College of Science would fry me to a crisp in my own lard if I did," Kinnison retorted. "We take her in, as is. Where are we, Worsel? Have you and the navigator found out yet?"
"'Way, 'way out—almost out of the Galaxy," Worsel replied, and one of the computers recited a string of numbers, then added, "I don't see how we could have come so far in that short a time."
"How much time was it—got any idea?" Kinnison asked, pointedly.
"Why, by the chronometers—Oh—" the man's voice trailed off.
"You're getting the idea. Wouldn't have surprised me much if we'd been clear out of the known universe. Hyperspace is funny that way, they say. Don't know a thing about it myself, except that we were in it for a while, but that's enough for me."
Back to Tellus they drove at the highest practicable speed, and at Prime Base scientists swarmed over and throughout the Boskonian vessel. They tore down, rebuilt, measured, analyzed, tested, and conferred.
"They got some of it. All of it, they say, except the stuff that is of real importance," Thorndyke reported to his friend Kinnison one day. "Old Cardynge is mad as a cateagle about your report of that vortex, or tunnel, or whatever it was. He says your lack of appreciation of the simplest fundamentals is something pitiful, or words to that effect. He's going to blast you to a cinder as soon as he gets hold of you."
"Vell, ve can't all be first violiners in der orchestra, some of us got to push vind through der trombone," Kinnison quoted, philosophically. "I done my darnedest. How's a guy going to report accurately on something he can't hear, see, feel, smell, taste, or sense? But I heard that they've solved that thing of the interpenetrability of the two kinds of matter. What's the low-down on that?"
"Cardynge says it's simple. Maybe it is, but I'm a technician myself, not a mathematician. As near as I can get it, the Overlords and their stuff were treated or conditioned with an oscillatory wave of some kind, so that under the combined action of the fields generated by the ship and the shore station all their substance was rotated almost out of space. Not out of space, exactly, either, more like, say, very nearly one hundred eighty degrees out of phase; so that two bodies—one untreated, our stuff—could occupy the same place at the same time without perceptible interference. The failure of either force, such as your cutting the ship's generators, would relieve the strain."