"Then you do understand some of this?"
Maculay grinned and nodded.
"But Doctor Maculay will be able to figure this thing out?"
Cliff nodded again, and smiled. "Good thing, too," he chuckled. "He is the only man in the system that can handle it without going off half-cocked. Maculay may be a stuffed shirt but he is no imbecile. Tinkering with inverted space—or pouring a quart of nitric acid over a half-gallon of glycerine—might be deadly unless you understand what you're doing. Maculay is super-cautious about anything that he does not understand completely. I cannot say the same for his underlings, who casually point out that mankind had been using electricity for years and years before they knew anything about it. But," he said with a laugh, "enough of the manifestation of the unreal roots of variable-matrix wave mechanics. Maculay's wastrel—but interesting—nephew is about to enjoy life."
Cliff winked at Dorothy, patted Helen on a bare shoulder, and then led Alice towards the dance floor.
"Doesn't this mean anything to you?" she asked him.
"Uh-huh," he said with a smile. "At about three cents per word; that black shaft of energy is an idea coming to life."
"What kind of idea?"
"Um—let's see. That black shaft of energy was really a spacecraft, passing through the solar system at a velocity higher than the speed of light. Some extra-solar race, colonizing the galaxy. What we detected was the space-wake of such a craft. You have no idea of the energy kicked up when a body passes through space at a velocity higher than that of light. Then Our Hero, bullied by his superiors, shows that he has measured the energy-curve and solved the secret of interstellar travel."
A slight frown came to Maculay's face. "The trouble is that this super-galactic race has learned how to create negative space before the ship and re-create positive space behind it to keep from having the—the—" A bead of sweat came upon Maculay's face and he became nervous. He looked around, almost wildly, before continuing, "the—entire universe," he concluded lamely. "Negative space is self-propagating, you know." Maculay finished this last with a wince of pain.