"No good. We're way off our warp. Even if we had the power, it'd take our beam, like our ship if it had enough free-drive fuel—about eighty thousand years to reach the nearest one. Remember, kid, we had warped some fifty thousand light-years out before you talked Logan into leaving the warp to fool around in free Space for awhile. Until we can jet our way back to warp-point, we can forget about communication."
Ronal understood too clearly what Krist was talking about. Travel in "free" Space, the ordinary three-dimensional kind, was measured in miles; warp-travel was measured in parsecs. "Free" speed, with old-fashioned fuel-eating jets which were supposed to be carried as emergency power units only, was forty thousand miles a second at best—warp-speed, depending on the dimension you used, had a top of better than a thousand light-years a minute. Leaving your warp to poke around in ordinary three-dimensional Space on jets was like leaving your surface-car parked on a speedway to hike up a side-road on foot. You had to get back to the speedway to get home. And if you broke a leg—
Krist was already outside, lugging tool-carriers to a spot Logan had selected to begin. Ronal turned to his wife.
"Well, we can't keep a weather-eye out for bug-eyed monsters in here," he said. "Might as well go brave the Great Unknown ourselves. C'mon!"
The heavy grass was wet and soft beneath their feet, and had a distinctive aroma of its own. Ronal thought to himself as they walked that perhaps the red, desert covered fourth planet would have been a better bet after all—at least cooler.
"We shouldn't get too far from the ship," Marla said.
"We won't. But I just want to look around—want a closer look at the jungle from the edge of the clearing. Always wanted to be able to tell people I'd been exploring on some strange, exotic planet somewhere—"
"It's strange enough. But quiet up to now, anyway. Maybe all that—"
They had reached the clearing's edge.