This was the freighter—or, more accurately, Doc Raven's great laboratory, suspension-built in the long, tapering mid-section of the battered, engineless ship which drifted silently in its dark, remote path around a pale sun. Only a scant five years ago Doc had been brought here following his costly Martian rescue, yet his equipment, which had been salvaged from a half-dozen hidden sanctuaries on as many different planets and brought here for him to assemble, had in that time grown to twice its original bulk. Sometimes Robbin thought of Doc as something less of a scientist and more of a wizard. It was often said, in the deadly seriousness that marked the spaceman's legends, that there is more to the Martian mind than a man of Earth might even dream of.
The long banks of control consoles emitted a blue-green glow of their own, silhouetting as they did the rows of relays, grid-circuits and reactor-registers.
Robbin did not know the little Martian scientist's source of power—but he knew that through this Colossus of engineering enough must pour to change the very courses of the planets in their paths, if Doc should will it.
His eyes turned back for a second time to the metal cylinder, gleaming dully in the blue-green light of the consoles, which stood more than half the height of the long, narrow lab itself. Except that it was twice as high and a little more than twice the diameter it looked like nothing more complex than an old-fashioned hot-water heater. Yet through it, the bent old man had said, flowed the raw flux of space-time, tapped from the fabric of the Universe itself.
"I'm not the guy for this job, Doc. You want somebody who's a scientific explorer or something. Right now, I've got to heist a new ship from someplace. I must be as hot as a two-credit rocket."
The echoes of his heavy voice were distorted strangely, and came back to him in half-sounds and whispers that had a hollowness of words that were spoken and had died a thousand years ago.
"It wouldn't work, Robbin boy. The day of the Vulture and her great legion is over," the old Martian said softly. The years in the penal colony had taken their toll, but his face still showed the intelligence that had once come close to conquering three worlds. "I could get you your ship within an hour with this—" he gestured toward the dully-glinting cylinder, "just as I plucked you from Space. But—in one other ship or with a fleet of one hundred, they'd have you by tomorrow or in a year from tomorrow. You've got to hide, Robbin. Believe an old man ... if I could devise an armor or a drive or a screen generator that would hide you from their tracks and torpedoes for the rest of your rebellious life I'd be at work on them this instant. But there is only one place left that I can hide you now—only one realm that they have not yet conquered. I grow old, Robbin, and they are catching up—"
"You said you could hide me in—in Time, I guess you said. I don't know what you mean, Doc. You could tell me about space-warps and time-continua and all that for the next ten years, and—"
"Space-time is like the very fabric of your tunic, Robbin." The answer came with the hint of a new excitement. "A set of slender threads in myriad numbers running in two dimensions, and another set running at right angles in another two. If they are the fabric of space-time, they comprise four simple dimensions—length and width, depth and time. You are—how tall? Six feet three inches. And, eleven inches through the chest, perhaps. Across the shoulders you measure twenty-three inches. And—you are thirty-three years old. Is that so difficult?"