Read Mission: Earth "Black Genesis" for Free Online

there so we can wait!"
    "Oh, yes," said Heller, recollecting what we were supposed to be talking about. "The Will-be Was engines.
    "Now, in the center of a Will-be Was there is an ordinary warp-drive engine just to give power and influence space. There is a sensor, not unlike this time-sight, but very big. It reads where time predetermines a mass to be. Then the engine makes a synthetic mass that time incorrectly reads to be half as big as a planet. The ordinary power plant thrusts this apparent mass against time itself. According to the time pattern, that mass, apparently HUGE, should not be there. Time rejects it. You get a thrust from the rejection. But, of course, the thrust is far too great as the mass is only synthetic. This causes the engine base to be literally hurled through space.
    "You can feel a slight unsteadiness in the ship. A jumpiness. That's because the drive is operating intermittently. As soon as it is hurled, it then sends another false message to time and is hurled again.
    "Unfortunately, on a ship this light, having so little mass, the cycle just keeps on adding up. The sensors read the new time determination, the synthetic mass is again slammed against time, time rejects it. 'Will-be,' says the mass synthesizer. 'Was,' insists time. Over and over. And the speed simply tries to rise up to infinity. There's no friction except an energy wake, no real work to do, so fuel efficiency is good.
    "The ship travels in the opposite direction to which the core drive in the Will-be Was converter is pointed. So steering is done by moving the direction of the small internal engine.
    "As you are travelling far, far faster than the speed of light, the visual image of an obstruction can't reach you in time and you have to guide the vessel by spotting future collisions. You see yourself collide, using the time-sight, with some heavenly mass in the future, so you change your course in the present and you don't collide. Life can control such things.
    "Battleships have big time-sights geared to their speed. But this one is manual and has to be adjusted."
    With a pop, the screen blew out. That startled me. I said, "You should shield those engines so they don't spray power all over the ship!"
    "Oh, these sparks aren't from the engine room. We're travelling so fast that we are intercepting too many photons—light particles from stars. We're also crossing force lines of gravity you wouldn't ordinarily detect, but at this speed, it kind of makes us into an electric motor. We are picking up incidental charge faster than we can use it or shed it."
    "You were going to fix that!" I had him there.
    He shrugged. Then he brightened. "You want to see it?"
    Before I could protest, he reached over and hit the buttons that turned the whole black surround of walls into a viewscreen which gave the exterior scene of space we were in!
    Suddenly, I was just perched on a chair and floor that existed like a platform in space.
    I almost fainted.
    I have seen a high-speed boat going through a lake, throwing up enormous fans of spray and leaving a vast
    turbulence of writhing wake. Turn that yellow-green* and make it three-dimensional and that was what I was looking at.
    Horrifying!
    The energy shedding flared out in twisting, terrifying sworls to every side!
    Behind us, for what might be a hundred miles, the collisions of tortured particles still churned!
    "My Gods!" I yelled. "Is that why Tug Two blew up?"
    He seemed to be admiring the churning Hells around us. It took him a bit to notice I had spoken.
    "Oh, no," he said, "I don't think that was why she blew up. Could have been, but not really likely."
    He was punching some buttons on the small independent viewscreen he had been playing the game on. "I was calculating what my ability to jump and my rate of fall would be on Blito-P3. The figures are still in the bank, so I'll use the gravity of Earth to show you."
    The Hells around us roared on. The small screen lit up. "Our average speed of this