Norton's thick hide sloughed off the insult because he was still the bright one.
He said, "The original Einstein equation of mass and energy shows that as the speed of light is reached, the mass reaches infinite mass. This is an obvious impossibility, since even the total mass of the Universe is not an infinite mass. So when a body traveling at faster-than-light is hurled into the real Universe by the collapse of the warp-generator, for the barest instant it is actually traveling beyond light. This causes it to assume some unknown factor of mass that no physicist has been able to theorize yet, but must be the impossible infinity-plus. At any rate, the fabric of space is twisted, as if by a gravitational field so powerful that the field wraps up around itself and forces the mass into a Universe of its own."
"You're talking gibberish."
"Sure I am. But you find me someone who can explain this effect without talking like an imbecile and I'll buy you a good cigar."
"All right—go on. What is supposed to happen?"
Norton shrugged. "If a volume of space is removed from the structure of space—this is more gibberish, Andrews, believe me—then there must be an instantaneous flow of space back to fill the gap. Now, for God's sake don't ask me why empty space has got to flow into a place where some empty space has been removed. I've always been taught that nothing from nothing leaves nothing. Maybe nothing from nothing leaves less nothing than before, but that sounds as silly as the rest of the whole fool argument. At any rate, every time a warp-generator collapses, the same twist occurs in the structure of space. There have been billions of bucks' worth of equipment shot into nothingness by the White Sands Space Academy in the last hundred years, just to see if someone can come up with a logical answer."
Andrews said coldly, "All right. So now what do we do?"
"We sit it out," Norton said cheerfully.
"Doing what?"