race. Tell me why don't people just go sit in
a corner and enjoy themselves. So far, we have done nothing but increase
our scurrying a thousand-fold."

* * * * *

He tried to make a joke of the matter. "You sound like a beatnik."

"Perhaps," she answered slowly, still looking up at the screen. "They
considered my father beat--dead-beat. But I know more of this science than
you do, Jack Odin. What if I told you there was little chance of finding
Maya. Or, if you found her, she might be an old, old lady."

"Well, I'd say 'Nuts.' We would keep on looking. But why such gloomy
thoughts?"

"You do not understand. Here, flashing through Trans-Space, we are in
another time. Oh, it goes by. But not as the clocks of Opal. Once a ship
slides out of here to a planet it is caught in a web of time and space. The
clocks resume their old work of grinding the minutes and the hours to bits.
The black oxen of the sun take up their measured march. Oh, I could show
you the mathematical formula to prove this, but it would take a blackboard
larger than the screen. Don't you see! While we search through Trans-Space,
it is highly possible that Grim Hagen, Maya, and all their crew are growing
old on some planet that you might never find."

Odin drew his hand across his face in dismay. "You make all this sound
like a mad voyage. Why, this is insane!"

"Check with Ato if you wish." Her sad smile was almost a sneer. "And men
talk of going to the stars. Where is the clock they will use? Where is
their yardstick? Where is the concept? Why, out there, for all you know,
Huckleberry Finn is still floating down the river, and Macbeth walks
through the halls of Dunsinane. And the last man, in the year one-million
AD, may be squatting over a fire, watching his last stick of wood turn to
ashes."

Lithely she got to her feet and reached a dial upon the screen. The lone
star vanished. A thousand pinpoints leaped out.

"There is but a segment," she said, sitting back upon the hassock again. "I
have known Maya all my life. I was the poor relation. I envied her, but I
did not hate her. And so with Grim Hagen. I should hate him, but I remember
him as a frustrated cousin who always ran second in the races. And all
that--even my father--seems far away and long ago. Why do you bring love
and hate with you out here to the stars, Jack Odin?"

"Because I am a man, I suppose."

She sighed again. "There is much more to this inve