"I'd rather ask you something. How did you know it would work?"
"You might say I became an expert in psychology over night," Hawkins replied. "Oh, not the scientific kind that you practice—but the every day kind that most people mean when they use the word. I discovered, for example, that because of a misunderstanding on the part of the communications people, we continued to send messages home after the alien had specifically warned us not to do so. At first I thought he might be ignoring this infraction of his rules, but then I began to wonder if it didn't mean that he just wasn't aware of what we were doing. I remembered that he talked a great deal about a C2 drive system which he claimed was so much better than the type we used. But when I asked the Navigator to do a little figuring, I discovered that by using subspace, we can actually get places much faster than his race does.
"It all added up to the fact that his race had never stumbled onto the use of subspace. I know that sounds incredible, but when I checked with one of the top physicists, I found out that we happened onto it by sheer accident—and an impossibly stupid one at that—and not through any high-level theorizing. The theory came later, after the process had been demonstrated in a laboratory.
"For a while I still couldn't believe it. But when we discovered that his space ship was a very small one—too small to utilize the subspace drive—I knew my guess had been correct. So I tricked him into letting us get into position where we could activate the drive—and had the engineers increase the effective radius so that we could pull Clarion and her three planets into subspace with us." Hawkins paused for a few seconds as he turned back to the observation window. "We'll need every sun and every planet we can lay our hands on."
Broussard leaned comfortably back against the door. "I think you were wise to take the pictures of the destruction of that fourth planet. We may need them to convince 'the folks back home' that this was the only solution to the problem."
Hawkins agreed with him. "They won't like giving up all the universe they've come to be used to, just to run away and hide in subspace. And you know, I think the poets and the sailors and the young people in love will hate us most of all."
"How do you mean?" asked Broussard.
"No more heaven full of stars to write poems about, to sail true courses by, and to sing love songs under. I guess a lot of us will be lonely for all the stars."
"Do you think they'll ever find us?" Broussard asked, changing the subject. "From the look on Lan Sur's face when he told about that other world, I suspect they'll move heaven and earth to find out where we've run to."
"Find us? The Dakn Empire? I just don't know. We've got a thousand ships equipped with the subspace drive. That's a thousand or so solar systems we can pull through into subspace before they can catch up with us—I hope. But we'll have to be careful. If one of our ships is ever caught, and they discover the drive, we're all done for. I doubt that they'll show us much mercy.