Jesperson chuckled. "You'll be twice as wealthy when you get back! Nothing makes money so fast as money."
Alan left the first week in December, having spent three weeks doing virtually nothing but sketching out his itinerary. There were plenty of places he intended to visit.
There was London, where James Hudson Cavour had lived and where his hyperdrive research had been carried out. There was the Lexman Institute of Space Travel in Zurich, where an extensive library of space literature had been accumulated; it was possible that hidden away in their files was some stray notebook of Cavour's, some clue that would give Alan a lead. He wanted to visit the area in Siberia that Cavour had used as his testing-ground, and from which the last bulletin had come from the scientist before his unexplained disappearance.
But it was not only a business trip. Alan had lived nearly half a year in the squalor of Hasbrouck—and because of his Free Status he would never be able to move into a better district, despite his wealth. But he wanted to see the rest of Earth. He wanted to travel just for the sake of travel.
Before he left, he visited a rare book dealer in York City, and for an exorbitant fifty credits purchased a fifth-edition copy of An Investigation into the Possibility of Faster-than-Light Space Travel, by James H. Cavour. He had left his copy of the work aboard the Valhalla, along with the few personal possessions he had managed to accumulate during his life as a starman.
The book dealer had frowned when Alan asked for the volume under the title he knew. "The Cavour Theory? I don't think—ah, wait." He vanished for perhaps five minutes and returned with an old, fragile, almost impossibly delicate-looking book. Alan took it and scanned the opening page. There were the words he had read so many times: "The present system of interstellar travel is so grossly inefficient as to be virtually inoperable on an absolute level."
"Yes, that's the book. I'll take it."
His first stop on his round-the-globe jaunt was London, where Cavour had been born and educated more than thirteen centuries before. The stratoliner made the trip across the Atlantic in a little less than three hours; it took half an hour more by Overshoot from the airport to the heart of London.
Somehow, from Cavour's few autobiographical notes, Alan had pictured London as a musty old town, picturesque, reeking of medieval history. He couldn't have been more wrong. Sleek towers of plastic and concrete greeted him. Overshoots roared by the tops of the buildings. A busy network of bridges connected them.
He went in search of Cavour's old home in Bayswater, with the nebulous idea of finding some important document wedged in the woodwork. But a local security officer shook his head as Alan asked for directions.