He was already far closer to Sirius than he would be if he tried to get any closer. And that was over eight light-years from it.
He looked at the chronometer and saw the hands had already reached 13:20. Thirty-three minutes left to him. Sirius was near—soon it would be in the bow of the ship—and Sirius was eight point six light-years away.
How could he move the ship a certain distance accurate to one hundredth of an inch? He couldn't. The answer was blunt and ugly and irrefutable: he couldn't.
He got up and walked across the room, feeling like a man who had in quick succession been condemned, reprieved, recondemned. He had been projected into a situation for which he had had no preliminary training whatever; had been made sole custodian and operator of a computer and a space warp shuttle that he had never before been permitted to touch. He had used the sound but not at all brilliant mind nature had given him to solve the riddle of the paradoxes and learn where he was and where he wanted to go. He had done quite well—he had solved every problem of his survival and the shuttle's delivery except the last one!
He passed by the shuttle and stopped to rest his hand on the bright, silvery focal ball. The solar system would be deep inside the ball; the atoms of the ball larger than Earth, perhaps, and far more impalpable than the thinnest air. The Slug cruisers would be in there, infinitesimally tiny, waiting for him to return....
No—faulty reasoning. The solar system was as it had always been, not diminished in size and not really in the ball. It was only that two different points in two different dimensions coincided in the ball....
He saw the answer.
He did not have to move the ship to Sirius—he had only to move the ball!
There would be little time, very little time. First, to see if the warp shuttle was portable—