He turned and looked disbelievingly up into the sky.
The Sun made him blink and his eyes watered.
"Now I can't even look at it," he said, "any more than I could before."
"Show me your mind," she said simply. "Where is it?"
"Well ..."
"That's the whole point of the Divers. A mind is not in space-time. It is connected with a body which is—or, to be exact, it is associated with—a physical brain, which in turn can work a mouth and hands to communicate what the mind has seen. The Solar Government has the problem in reverse. They can send ships through hyper-space; otherwise, as you know, we could never have populated the Galaxy. Why, Polaris, which you visited, is over a thousand light-years from Earth! They can make matter shift in and out of hyper-space. But they can't communicate that far away. Radiation won't take the shift. So the government can either send radio waves out and wait a couple of thousand years for the answer, or it has to shuttle whole ships to and fro just to get a simple message.
"Worse, from a defense viewpoint, there are times when they must have information fast and when the nature of the news means that no ship will be either available or allowed to become available to carry the news. Suppose you are an intelligent life-form off Canopus and you think up a magnificent way of taking over the Solar System. You're six hundred and fifty light-years away, but time is no problem because either you live longer than that or you have a tribe-culture. Even if the system had a billion police ships, which it hasn't, it could never be sure of catching Canopus preparing, or intercepting whatever horror they sent off. And even if it were lucky, the ship would have to come back itself to get the news to the Solar Government.
"A Diver can send his mind instantaneously from one end of the universe to the other, he can examine atomic particles or survey galaxies, he can see through matter as if it were full of holes—which it is—he can patrol sectors and report exactly what he found there. He can dive into deep space and be free."
"Yes," Fred Williams said. "That's it. Free. That's exactly how we feel, isn't it?"