"You've been through the Little Death before," said Saxon. He and Murdock, the T.I.S. agent, were in the control room, Murdock's eye glued to the scanner. "What's it like, Murdock?"
The gaunt, frosty T.I.S. agent took his eyes from the scanner, faced Saxon.
"Not so bad," he replied laconically.
"I've heard it's a pretty rugged experience."
Murdock allowed himself a tight smile. "That depends on how active a social consciousness you have. You're a non-Newtonian physicist. You know the Pachner conception of the space-time continuum better than I do. Villainowski's stellar drive inverts the Newtonian concept that a vehicle travels through space during a passage of time. It operates through time during a passage of space.
"Yes, yes," Saxon interrupted impatiently. "But the effects of the time field.... What do you experience while the ship is in the time field?"
"That's the Little Death," replied Murdock in a dry voice, "though the name is misleading. Actually you experience a segment of your own life, either the past, the future, or the present. As Villainowski would explain it, time is co-existent, while in the time field our lives are spread out around us, but because we're equipped with three-dimensional sense organs we're restricted to a single series of episodes anywhere along our life span."
Saxon frowned and said, "In other words, it's just as if we returned to the past and relived some incident that occurred to us before?"
"Right. Or into the future and experienced something that hasn't happened yet."
Saxon's frown deepened. "But what's so rugged about that?"