“Well, I’d say ‘Nuts.’ We would keep on looking. But why such gloomy thoughts?”
“You do not understand. Here, flashing through Trans-Space, we are in another time. Oh, it goes by. But not as the clocks of Opal. Once a ship slides out of here to a planet it is caught in a web of time and space. The clocks resume their old work of grinding the minutes and the hours to bits. The black oxen of the sun take up their measured march. Oh, I could show you the mathematical formula to prove this, but it would take a blackboard larger than the screen. Don’t you see! While we search through Trans-Space, it is highly possible that Grim Hagen, Maya, and all their crew are growing old on some planet that you might never find.”
Odin drew his hand across his face in dismay. “You make all this sound like a mad voyage. Why, this is insane!”
“Check with Ato if you wish.” Her sad smile was almost a sneer. “And men talk of going to the stars. Where is the clock they will use? Where is their yardstick? Where is the concept? Why, out there, for all you know, Huckleberry Finn is still floating down the river, and Macbeth walks through the halls of Dunsinane. And the last man, in the year one-million AD, may be squatting over a fire, watching his last stick of wood turn to ashes.”
Lithely she got to her feet and reached a dial upon the screen. The lone star vanished. A thousand pinpoints leaped out.
“There is but a segment,” she said, sitting back upon the hassock again. “I have known Maya all my life. I was the poor relation. I envied her, but I did not hate her. And so with Grim Hagen. I should hate him, but I remember him as a frustrated cousin who always ran second in the races. And all that—even my father—seems far away and long ago. Why do you bring love and hate with you out here to the stars, Jack Odin?”
“Because I am a man, I suppose.”
She sighed again. “There is much more to this invention of mine that I showed you. Upon that screen there must be ten thousand worlds. Let us pick one, you and I. We can glide out of here at any time. And we can make that world over as we please. We might even eat of the fruit of life and become as gods—”
As though it came from the dark corridor of the years, Jack Odin seemed to hear the resounding echo of slow footsteps, and a deep voice that thundered: “For I, thy God, am a jealous God—”