"Everything been going all right?" he asked.
Gary growled deep in his throat.
"What could go wrong out here? Not even any meteors. Nothing to do but sit and watch. And there really isn't any need of that. The robot navigator handles everything." The soft purr of the geosectors filled the ship. There was no other sound. The ship seemed standing still in space. Saturn swung far down to the right, a golden disk of light with thin, bright rings.
Pluto was a tiny speck of light almost dead ahead, a little to the left.
The Sun, three billion miles astern, was shielded from their sight.
The Space Pup was headed for Pluto at a pace that neared a thousand miles a second. The geosectors, warping the curvature of space itself, hurled the tiny ship through the void at a speed unthought of less than a hundred years before.
And now Tommy Evans, out on Pluto, was ready, if only the Solar Commerce commission would stop its interference, to bullet his experimental craft away from the solar system, out toward the nearest star, 4.29 light-years distant. Providing his improved electro-gravatic geodesic deflectors lived up to the boast of their inventors, he would exceed the speed of light, would vanish into that limbo of impossibility that learned savants only a few centuries before had declared was unattainable.
"It kind of makes a fellow dizzy," Herb declared.
"What does?”
"Why," said Herb, "this Tommy Evans stunt. The boy is making history. And maybe we'll be there to see him do it. He's the first to make a try at the stars — and if he wins, there will be lots of others. Man will go out and out and still farther out, maybe clear out to where space is still exploding.”