That was obvious. The Stallifer was deep in the void of interstellar space. She traveled at twelve hundred times the speed of light. Escape from the ship was impossible. And concealment past discovery when the ship docked was preposterous.
"That remains to be seen," said Torren coldly. "Come this way."
Torren went down a hallway. He slipped into a narrow doorway, unnoticeable unless one was looking for it. Stan followed. He found himself in that narrow, compartmented space between the ship's inner and outer skins. A door; another compartment; another door. Then a tiny air-lock—used for the egress of a single man to inspect or repair such exterior apparatus as the scanners for the ship's vision screens. There was a heap of assorted apparatus beside the air-lock door.
"I prepared for this," said Torren curtly. "There's a space suit. Put it on. Here's a meteor miner's space skid. There are supplies. I brought this stuff as luggage, in water-tight cases. I'll fill the cases with my bath water and get off the ship with the same weight of luggage I had when I came on. That's my cover-up."
"And I?" asked Stan harshly.
"You'll take this chrono. It's synchronized with the ship's navigating clock. At two-two even you push off from the outside of the ship. The drive field fluctuates. When it collapses, you'll be outside it. When it expands—"
Stan Buckley raised his eyebrows. This was clever! The Bowdoin-Hall field, which permits of faster-than-light travel, is like a pulsating bubble, expanding and contracting at rates ranging from hundreds of thousands of times per second to the forty-per-second of deep-space speed. When the field is expanding, and bars of an artificial allotrope of carbon are acted upon by electrostatic forces in a certain scientific fashion, a ship and all its contents accelerate at a rate so great that it simply has no meaning. As the field contracts, a ship decelerates again. That is the theory, at any rate. There is no proof in sensation or instrument readings that such is the case. But velocity is inversely proportional to the speed of the field's pulsations, and only in deep space does a ship dare slow the pulsations too greatly, for fear of complications.
However, a man in a space suit could detach himself from a space ship traveling by the Bowdoin-Hall field. He could float free at the instant of the field's collapse, and be left behind when it expanded again. But he would be left alone in illimitable emptiness.
"You'll straddle the space skid," said Torren shortly. "It's full powered—good for some millions of miles. At two-two exactly the Stallifer will be as close to Khor Alpha as it will go. Khor Alpha's a dwarf white star that's used as a course marker. It has one planet that the directories say has a breathable atmosphere, and list as a possible landing refuge, but which they also say is unexamined. You'll make for that planet and land. You'll wait for me. I'll come!"