"What do they want us to do?" asked Evans.
"They want us to build a machine," said Caroline, "a machine that will serve as an anchor post for one end of a space-time contortion. The other end will be on the world of the Engineers. Between those two machines, or anchor posts, will be built up a short-cut through the billions of light-years that separate us from them.”
She glanced at Kingsley. "We'll need strong materials," she said. "Stronger than anything we know of in the system. Something that will stand up under the strain of billions of light-years of distorted space.”
Kingsley wrinkled his brow.
"I was thinking of a suspended electron-whirl," she said. "Have you experimented with it here?”
Kingsley nodded. "We've stilled the electron-whirl," he said. "Our cold laboratories offer an ideal condition for that kind of work. But that won't do us any good. I can suspend all electronic action, stop all the electrons dead in their tracks, but to keep them that way they have to be maintained at close to absolute zero. The least heat and they overcome inertia and start up again. Anything you built of them would dissolve as soon as it heated up, even a few degrees.
"If we could crystallize the atomic orbit after we had stopped it," he said, "we'd have a material which would be phenomenally rigid. It would defy any force to break it down.”
"We can do it," Caroline said. "We can create a special space condition that will lock the electrons in their places.”
Kingsley snorted. "Is there anything," he asked, "that you can't do with space?”
Caroline laughed. "A lot of things I can't do, doctor," she told him. "A few things I can do. I was interested in space. That's how I happened to discover the space-time warp principle. I thought about space out there in the shell. I figured out ways to control it. It was something to do to while away the time.”