He took wry pleasure in imagining what was going on aboard Jodrell Bank at that moment. At least not all the bewilderment was his own. They would be utterly baffled. As far as they were concerned, their navigator had been on the bridge at one moment and the next moment gone, tracelessly. That in itself was a major puzzle; the only way off an FTL ship in flight was in the direction called "suicide." That would have been their assumption, all right, as soon as they realized he was gone and checked the ship to make sure he was not for some reason wandering about in a cargo hold or unconscious in a closet after some hard-to-imagine attack from another crewman. They would have thought that somehow, crazily, he had got into a suit—there was the suit—and jumped out of a lock. But there would have been no question of going back to look for him. True, they could have tracked his subspace radio if he had used it. But what would have been the good of that? The first question, an all but unanswerable one, would be how long ago he had jumped. Even if they knew that, Jodrell Bank, making more than five hundred times light-speed, could not be stopped in fewer than a dozen light-years. They could hardly hope to return to even approximately the location in space where he might have jumped; and there was no hope of reaching a position, stopping, casting about, starting again—the accelerations were too enormous, a man too tiny a dust-mote.
And, of course, he would have been dead in the first place, anyway. The transition from FTL drive to normal space was instantly fatal except within the protecting shield of a ship's engines.
So they would have given him up and, hours later—or days, for he had lost track of time—they would have received his message. What would they make of that?
He didn't know. After all, he hardly knew what he made of it himself.
The woman still slept. The way back was still open. He could tell by sniffing the air that the poisons in the atmosphere were still gaining. Ahead there was nothing but blank walls, and the clutter of useless equipment littering the floor. Stolidly McCray closed his mind and waited.
The signal came at last.
"Mac, we have verified your position." The voice was that of Captain Tillinger, strained and shaking. "I don't know how you got there, but unless the readings lie you're the hell of a long way off. The bearing is identical with Messier object M-42 and the distance—" raggedly—"is compatible. About a thousand light-years from us, Mac. One way or another, you've been kidnaped. I—I—"
The voice hesitated, unable to say what it could not accept as fact but could not deny. "I think," it managed at last, "that we've finally come across those super-beings in space that we've wondered about."
Hatcher's detached limbs were quivering with excitement—and with more than excitement, because he was afraid. He was trying to conceal from the others just how afraid he was.