"They want us to come out to the edge of the universe," she said, and there was a tiny quaver of excitement in her voice.
Herb's chair clattered to the floor as he leaped to his feet. "They want us…" he started to shout and then be stopped and the room swam in heavy silence.
Gary heard the rasp of breath in Kingsley's nostrils, sensed the effort that the man was making to control himself as he shaped a simple question… the question that any one of them would have asked.
"How do they expect us to get out there?" Kingsley asked.
"My ship is fast," Tommy Evans said, "faster than anything ever built before. But not that fast!”
"A space-time warp," said Kingsley, and his voice was oddly calm. "They must be using a space-time warp to communicate with us. Perhaps….”
Caroline smiled at him. "That's the answer," she said.
"A short cut. Not the long way around. Cut straight through the ordinary space-time world lines. A hole in space and time.”
Kingsley's great fists were opening and closing again. Each time he closed them the knuckle bones showed white through the tight-stretched skin.
"How will we do it?" asked Herb. "There isn't a one of us in the room could do it. We play around with geosectors that we use to drive our ships and think we're the tops in progress. But the geosectors just warp space any old way. No definite pattern, nothing. Like a kid playing around in a mud puddle, pushing the mud this way or that. This would take control… you'd have to warp it in a definite pattern and then you'd have to make it stay that way.”