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What would happen to you if you bailed out of a ship at faster-than-light velocities? They said, as you reach it time approaches zero and mass approaches infinity. Achilles and the tortoise; as logic approaches perfection, truth approaches zero. Someone said C (the terminal velocity) was a gateway into another universe, or another phase in phased space. Some said, death and dissolution, for all the electrical phenomena of biochemistry would, with all the rules of physics, be so changed that organization of matter and of life would be disrupted. And some said no: transformation phenomena (mass into energy into space into time, each proportionately interchangeable) might retain
pattern
, and some inconceivably different form of life might be possible. Over it all was the certainty that to bail out, away from the guarding life-support, artificial gravity, and all the othertissues of the man-made womb that was a spaceship, would be expulsion into something utterly strange and hostile. Bailing out in the stratosphere, with 95 percent of the atmosphere underneath one, and a temperature drop of perhaps two hundred degrees … the name of that is Lethal. Multiply it by what, then, in space, in that strange country where time itself might turn on its tail?
    And always the other argument: that velocity itself is not a commanding factor; that early in the days of railroading wise men said that the ears would bleed, the sight would fail, the blood be unable to circulate at twenty miles an hour; and that all the talk of C was the same logical untruth; speed has no absolute, velocity is always relative, and that the only danger in bailing out is the matter of being a hell of a way from anywhere.
    Well, Case had found out (with Jan, with Jan) by doing it, and it hadn’t taught him a thing, except maybe that one can live through it. Not how, not what happened to them. The shrill alarm, the echoing-everywhere voice saying
abandon
, the clutch of fear on the way to his assigned lifeboat station when the mail hull started to buckle and the airtight barrier slammed down between him and his boat (and a good thing too; that whole section of the ship cracked away and exploded outward, boats and all) and the lights gone, the gravity gone, the wild scramble through familiar-unfamiliar gates and corridors to his alternate station, where he tumbled through the hatch (on top of someone else, he didn’t know who) and kicked out and squirmed around, treading the other as he craned back to the corridor to see if anyone else was coming; but then, you couldn’t
see
. If there was or was not, his conscience was clear (though his regret could never be) for the automatic override canceled his manual launch controls, and he fell back into the lifeboat as it clanged shut and banged away from the ship. The boat’s inertia-field took over at launch and saved them the terrible agony of acceleration, but its vibratory effect, chiming down the scale, was an agony of its own. His shipmate was as preoccupied with this as he, and the only thing he could clearly recall was a spinning glimpse of the ship with a ragged cavity in its midsection—the first part to blow off, the part that had contained his lifeboat station—limned in flickeringarcs as the ruptured power cables lashed and vomited.
    Probably they were both unconscious for a time. Case remembered a hazy inspection of the instruments, which had no useful information for him at all, except that the craft was sound and that its converter was picking up a reasonable amount of usable atomic hydrogen, so that fuel and life-support would not be a problem. Almost detachedly he watched his hands on the controls, running through the implanted checklist, setting the computer to hunt for a ship and/or a terrestrial planet, the drive to maximum (the computer would not use maximum, but in that setting, max. was available), and the life-support complex: on, with alarms. A touch on one control took inventory of all stores