"I'm sorry, General. This is in your reports somewhere, too. I can't. Not until Doctor Norvel can locate it. It's too far out for me to locate. I'd have to have an, an anchor on that end—something I could contact—before I could center on it. And I don't have. I can't even feel it, if you see what I mean. There's, nothing to get ahold of. If I could ... I could just teleport an atom bomb there, and we wouldn't need to worry with the rocket at all." She snubbed out her cigarette.
"Couldn't you get a fix on this frequency that controls your mutant powers and locate the space station that way?"
"Neither Dr. Norvel nor I could detect it with the available equipment: we tried. There's no way of knowing what equipment's required. It's probable the frequency is displaced from normal space; if it is, we can't even tell the increment of displacement. It's just a hopeless task."
"Well, it will take us two weeks or more, then...." He crossed out something on the paper before him.
"Suppose they attack before that?"
"I'm coming to that possibility.... I see you say here that mutants can be destroyed by bomb concussions because they can't displace sufficiently far without teleporting. What do you mean there?"
"It's complicated. If the bomb has too much inertia to be teleported off target, they have to remove themselves from the blast area. And they can't remove themselves far enough—not in space, but in relation to space; so they'd have to teleport, and that would be fatal."
"Ummm. Bullets?"
"They could displace themselves far enough to avoid a bullet."
The general wrote something down. "How large an explosion would suffice?"