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theory to explain it." He pushed himself back down to the keypad and typed in another set of numbers.
    "What about relativity?" Judy asked.
    Allen laughed. "If relativity could predict something like this, we'd have been using hyperdrive since 1925 or so. No, it's a completely new phenomenon." He pulsed the engine again, and while they waited for the timing signal to catch up he said, "I'm betting it won't contradict anything we already know, but we'll probably have to modify our existing theories to account for it. In the meantime, if we can figure out how it works experimentally, we'll be miles ahead of the theorists."
    "So to speak," Judy said.
    The radio beeped, and Allen said, "Okay, another three million miles. Now we go back near a gravity field . . ." He punched in more coordinates, and when he pressed the "Go" button Earth blinked into view again, this time at least half a million miles away. The Moon was just a small sphere beside it. Allen didn't wait for the timing pulse to catch up. He set up another jump, and this time Earth shifted across the star field. They'd apparently gone sideways, rather than toward or away from it. When the timing pulse from that jump arrived, Allen nodded and said, "Two hundred thousand. Much shorter. So gravity does affect it. Now we just have to figure out how much." He began to whistle softly as he set to work analyzing the data.
    After a few minutes, he said, "Hang on; I'm going to see if I can actually hit a target this time."
    "What target?" Judy asked immediately, but he'd already pushed the button. She looked out the windows and gasped in surprise. Saturn had swelled into view like a soap bubble rising from a cosmic bathtub toy. The planet itself looked about the size of the full Moon seen from Earth, with its rings more than double that width. The shuttle had materialized over one of the poles, so the rings went all the way around.
    "Very funny," Judy said.
    Allen looked out the window and grinned. "Good old inverse-square law. You've got to love it." Anybody who knew how to calculate an orbit knew the inverse-square law: the gravitational attraction of a given mass dropped off with the square of the distance from it. The same rule worked for light intensity, sound volume, and just about any other quantity that issued from a point source. Judy tried to imagine how it applied here. It was hard to think with Saturn just outside the window, but she forced herself to look away and concentrate on what Allen had said. "So did jumping to Saturn just now take more energy than the same distance in flat space, or did it take less because we were going downhill?" Allen shook his head. "More. Apparently whenever you get near mass, it takes more energy to create the warp field, no matter which way you go. You've got to warp it twice, see, once at the point where you leave the normal universe and once where you drop back in." He wrinkled his forehead, thinking, then said, "In fact, if it took less energy going toward a big mass, then we'd probably have wound up inside a black hole on our first jump."
    Judy winced at the thought, but Allen didn't notice. He said, "The good news is, distance is just a minor factor in the equation, so as long as we don't try jumping directly from planet to planet, we can make interstellar jumps without having to take along a nuclear reactor for power."
    "I thought you said you could jump directly from the surface into space."
    "You can. You just don't want to go very far on the first jump, or it uses more energy. So you make a short jump to get outside the gravity well, then a long jump to someplace near where you want to go, then another short jump to land.
    Well, actually a bunch of short jumps, because you can't go all the way to the surface."
    "Why not?"
    Allen had been waving his arms as he talked; he reached out to one of the remote video monitors to steady himself. "Two reasons. When you jump, you keep your initial velocity, so unless you match it