Silently they watched the sky. Dead below them, a tiny black circle appeared and the stars that once occupied this circle were flowing away from it radially. It expanded, and the region of flow spread circularly, and the bowl of the sky moved like a fluid thing towards the top of the ship until the stars at their nose were crowding together. Stars appeared there, new stars caused by the crossing of electromagnetic waves from the rear, and the sky took on an alien sight.
For a long time the stars seemed to tighten in their positions above the ship, and then the warning bell rang and the ship swapped ends easily and the bowl of the sky was below them.
Then it began to return to the fore observation point of the Haywire Queen as the velocity of the ship dropped. The crawl started, and the black circle diminished until it was gone. The stars continued to regain their familiar color as the Haywire Queen approached the normal velocities used by mankind.
Five hours after their start, the Haywire Queen slid clumsily to a stop beside Station 1 and made a landing. She arced a bit, since the charge-generating equipment did not have the refinements of the Lens flitters for making the ship assume the charge of the destined station. But the arc was not too bad, and within a minute after the Haywire Queen touched the landing deck, John McBride was knocking on the door of Dr. Caldwell's office in the hospital.
Caldwell came out of the inner door to answer the summons, and he looked up at McBride and went dead-white.
"Mac! It's you?"
"Naturally," smiled McBride. "How's Enid?"
"How did you get here?" demanded Doc.
"That's a long yarn, Doc, and it includes a whole engineering program, exceeding the velocity of light, and using a space warp as a traveling companion. How's Enid?"