"I venture to predict that in the future days—if, that is, we successfully accomplish our mission—it will become the standard method of space travel. Its advantages are obvious. Instantaneous transfer of objects from one spot to another ... why, just think! Tomorrow's earthman may eat for breakfast fresh budberries plucked that morning from the marshes of Venus, covered with milk shipped short hours ago from a Martian dairy ranch!"
"All of which," said the little steward, Herby Hawkins apologetically, "sounds mighty good, guv'nor. And maybe this here now device is, like you say, child's play. But—beggin' your pardon, sir—I still don't get it. 'Ow can a ship get so fast from one plyce to another? Almost like it was in two plyces at the same time?"
"Why," explained Dr. Bryant professorially, "simply by contracting into contigual adjacency two loci of the continuum—"
"Excuse me a minute, Doctor," grinned Gary. "Maybe I can explain it in a way Hawkins will understand more easily. You see, Hawkins, it's like this. I draw two circles on this piece of paper—" He sketched rapidly—"Now, let us suppose you are a two-dimensional creature living in this universe, which we will call 'Flatland.' You are on this world and you wish to travel to that one. How would you go about it?"
"Naturally," said Hawkins, "this way." And he drew his finger laterally between the two "worlds." "A stryte line bein' the shortest distance between two points—"
"Of course," said Gary. "And being a Flatlander you would have neither knowledge nor comprehension of any swifter way of making a journey than to traverse the broad width of the sheet. However, three-dimensional creatures like ourselves can immediately see a still shorter and easier way of traveling from one sphere to the other. We would simply—" He picked up the sheet of paper and folded it so the two worlds lay adjacent—"We would simply create a two-dimensional space warp through the third dimension."
"Well, blimey!" said Hawkins.
"To complete the analogy," Gary went on, "that is what the Jovians have done ... only working in four dimensions rather than three.
"Everyone knows magnetic matter warps space. Einstein proved that way back in the early days of the Twentieth Century. So the scientists of Jupiter have invented a machine which, setting up a highly magnetized flux field, warps three-dimensional space in the direction of the flight they wish to make. Their 'ends of the paper' fold together ... and when the warping machine is again disengaged you are where you want to be. It's as easy as that."