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exploring. But the alternative—letting it become a military secret—felt infinitely worse. She took a deep breath and said, "Go ahead and do what you have to do." 5
    As Allen keyed in coordinates, he said, "I'm going to set it for one-tenth of a percent of our first jump. That should cut our distance down to a few light-seconds, and put less strain on the engine." Judy nodded. "Good."
    He pressed the "Go" button. The radio beeped, but the view out the windows remained the same. Judy didn't know whether that was because they hadn't gone anywhere, or because they just hadn't gone far enough to change the scenery. Without planets close by, that would take a long jump. They would have to leap clear across the Solar System before the stars would even start to shift position. Seconds crawled by while they waited for the radio pulse to catch up with them. Judy said, "Are you sure your receiver is—" but then the radio beeped again and Allen said, "Aha, got it! We went . . . three and a half million miles. Holy cow."
    He keyed in more coordinates, then took them through hyperspace again. After five or six seconds, the radio beeped again, then about ten seconds later it beeped again. "Okay," he said, "we've got our triangulation, and that at least looks good. No aiming error. But that distance . . ." He trailed off, keying in more coordinates.
    He took them on three more jumps in rapid succession. Every time Judy heard the beep of the radio beacon, she felt a shiver run up her spine. It wasn't the sound, but the momentary disorientation of the jump that went with it. Each time it happened, she imagined herself being torn apart atom-by-atom and squirted through some higher dimension to someplace else. Allen had sworn it didn't work that way, but her subconscious mind evidently didn't believe him. She wished he would at least get the thing calibrated so she wouldn't keep wondering if the next jump would take them halfway across the galaxy. But after their fifth jump in as many minutes, he was still frowning and scratching his head. "What's wrong?" she asked him.
    "It doesn't make sense," he said. "It's taking far less energy to create the space warp than I calculated it would. It's almost an order of magnitude off, except for the jumps from Earth and the Moon. Those were only four or five times as efficient as I expected. But that still translates into distances anywhere from ten to a hundred times as far as I intended to take us."
    "You mean you can't predict where you're going to go?"
    He smiled reassuringly. "Sure I can. It's repeatable; we demonstrated that earlier. I can figure out the energy/distance correlation by trial and error if I have to, but I'd much rather be able to calculate it ahead of time, especially for long jumps. When we start going light-years at a stretch, we don't want to wind up in interstellar space with no idea of where we are."
    Judy shivered. "You're right about that." She didn't even like not knowing where in the Solar System they were, but to be lost light-years away from home would be terrifying. Allen drifted up to the overhead windows and looked out. "Hmm. I wonder . . ."
    "What?" A cooling fan turned on in the control console; Judy pulled herself closer to Allen so she could hear better.
    "I wonder if mass has anything to do with it. I did all my initial tests in vacuum chambers at the bottom of Earth's gravity well; maybe it doesn't take as much energy to punch a hole in space when you're not close to a large mass."
    Judy felt her breath catch in her throat. She had to swallow before she could say, " Maybe mass has something to do with it? You don't know ?"
    He shrugged. "How could I? This is my first chance to get away from it."
    "But—didn't your theories predict anything like this?"
    He smiled cheerfully. "What theories? I stumbled across the effect while I was working on the electron plasma battery. I puzzled it out enough to make the engine, but I don't have anything like an all-inclusive