"Yes, sir!" Haddix beamed.
"Good. Return tonight without Tremaine and you'll be promoted. Good luck, Captain."
Alan felt awkward in the cumbersome spacesuit, clomping along the hull of warp-ship seven with Captain Haddix. Ahead of him, Haddix looked like some grotesque monster in the shapeless, inflated suit. But Haddix had learned to slide his feet along in their magnet-shod boots and could move with comparative ease.
"There's the warp-station," Haddix called over the suit intercom, pointing with one gauntleted hand toward a black globe which obscured the starlight overhead. From the globe, an incredibly straight black line darted out across the gulf of space like a bridge to infinity. From here it seemed only inches thick, but Alan knew it was actually fifty feet across.
"That's the warp," Haddix said. "It bends space as if space were a sheet of paper with Venus at one corner and Mars at another. You fold the sheet of paper across to place Venus and Mars in juxtaposition. In the same way, this warp folds space, aligning Venus and Mars in sub-space."
"Why can't men travel the same way?" Alan asked. "It's almost instantaneous, isn't it? It takes almost a month by spaceship from Mars to Venus."
Haddix's laughter purred over the intercom. "Uh-uh," he said. "The stresses in a space-warp are tremendous. Water has no shape to lose, so it doesn't matter. A man would be mangled. Well, are you ready, Mr. Tremaine?"
"I guess so."
"Fine. Just point yourself in the direction of the warp-station, unmagnetize your boots and switch on your shoulder jets. Once you get the hang of it, it's a cinch. Here we go."