"Anxious, Margot. A hyper-pilot is always anxious just before crossover. You've got to be, because the slightest miscalculation can send you fifty thousand light years off course." "So? All you'd have to do is re-enter hyper-space and go back." Ramsey shook his head. "Hyper-space can only be entered from certain points in space. We've never been able to figure out why." "What certain points?" * * * * * Ramsey looked at her steadily. "Points which vary with the orbits of the three thousand humanoid worlds, Margot," he said slowly. He watched her for a reaction, knowing that strange fact about hyper-space--perfectly true and never understood--dovetailed with her father's letter about proto-man, an unknown pre-human ancestor of all the humanoid races in the galaxy, who had discovered hyper-space, bred variations to colonize all the inhabitable worlds, found or created the three thousand crossover points in space, and used them. Margot showed no response, but then, Ramsey told himself, she was a tri-di actress. She could feign an emotion--or hide one. She merely asked: "Is it true that there's no such thing as time in hyper-space?" "That's right. That's why you can travel scores or hundreds or thousands of light years through hyper-space in hours. Hyper-space is a continuum of only three dimensions. There is no fourth dimension, no dimension of duration." "Then why aren't trips through hyper-space instantaneous? They take several hours, don't they?" "Sure, but the way scientists have it figured, that's subjective time. No objective time passes at all. It can't. There isn't any--in hyper-space." "Then you mean--" Ramsey shook his head. "0134:02," he said. "It's almost time." The seconds ticked away. Even Margot did not seem relaxed now. She stared nervously at the chronometer, or watched Ramsey's lips as he silently read away the seconds. A place where time did not exist, an under-stratum of extension sans duration. An idea suddenly entered her mind, and she was afraid. If proto-man had colonized the galactic worlds between one and four or five million years ago, but if time did not exist for proto-man, then wasn't the super-race which had engendered all mankind still waiting in its timeless home, waiting perhaps grimly amused to see which of their progeny first discovered their secret? Or must proto-man, like humans everywhere, fall victim to subjective time if objective time did not matter for him? Ramsey was saying softly: "Fifty-three, fifty-four, fifty-five, fifty-six ... blastoff!" His hand slammed down on the activating key. An instant later, having felt no sensation of acceleration, they were floating weightlessly in the cabin of the little _Enterprise_. * * * * *