She nodded.

He flipped the switches that would send the fuel rods into the reactor.
Below them a soft, barely audible whine ascended the sonic scale to
a point of irritating inaudibility. Kennon smiled. The spindizzy was
functioning properly. He flipped a second bank of switches and a dull
roar came from the buried stem. Ashes and pumice heated to incandescence
were blown through the air. Molten drops of radioactive lava skittered
across the durilium hull as Kennon advanced the power. The whole stem
of the ship was immersed in a seething lake of bolling rock as the Egg
lifted slowly with ponderous dignity into the night sky.

"Hang on!" Kennon said. "I'm going to hyper." His hand moved a red lever
and the Egg shimmered and vanished with a peculiar wrenching motion
into an impossible direction that the mind could not grasp. And the
interceptor missile from Otpen One nosed through the space the Egg had
occupied.

* * *

"We made it!" Kennon said, looking across the writhing semifluid control
board, shifting oddly in the harsh yellow monochromatic light that
pervaded the cabin. The screens were leaking like sieves, but they were
holding well enough to keep Cth yellow from being anything more than an
annoyance. He glanced over at Copper, a fantastically elongated Copper
who looked like a madman's dream of chaos.

And Copper screamed! The sound echoed and re-echoed, dying away with a
lingering discordant reverberation that made his skin tingle.

"Copper! It's all right! It's all fight! Stop it!"

Copper screamed again and her elongated figure suddenly foreshortened
and collapsed into a small writhing ball from which two small pink hands
emerged clutching at a gelid mass of air that flowed sluggishly around
them.

And Kennon knew what he had forgotten! Hyperspace with leaky screens was
nothing to inflict upon an unprepared mind. It is one thing to endure
partial exposure after months of training, with experienced medics
standing by to help you through the shock phase, but quite another to
be thrust from a safe and sheltered existence into the mind shattering
distortions of the Cth continuum.

The Egg was old. Her screens, never good at best, were hardly more than
filters. Through the hull, through the drive lattice, the viciously
distorted Cth environment seeped into the ship turning prosaic shapes
of controls and instruments into writhing masses of obscene horror that
sent extensions wiggling off into nothingnes