"And if we could," said Billy, "we'd have to wait a few years while the beams got to our stars. They propagate at the speed of light, you know."
"Wonder if we could drop a beam from close by, go into superdrive and race for the other star, stretching—"
"What causes the traction?"
"The ... ah ... I see what you mean. It's the fact that the beam itself is ponderable and unyielding. Superdrive or no, the beam would propagate at speed of light and the superdriven ship would either be held back or the beam would break because of the space between excitation pulses. O.K., Billy, how do we jerk a hunk out of a star core?"
"We can't do the Samson Trick," said Billy, "but—"
"Samson Trick?"
"Samson was supposed to have brought the temple down about his ears by taking two of the main pillars and pulling one against the other. Well, we can't pull one star core against another, but why can't we set up a tripod, anchored in the stellar core, and then use that as a base for hauling with another beam? And feed power for the gadget from other stellar intake beams right from the star itself."
"In other words a sort of reflex Samson Trick? You make the star pull itself apart, with the aid of mankind and a few thousand years of technical development. I'll have the boys get to work."
"Did you get any compression?"
Hendricks shook his head.