Admiral Meldrum shook his head. "This is no Court Military," he said. "This is a Court of Inquiry. You would have faced this court if you had returned home on schedule, to deliver your report. There have been no charges made formally. If your explanation is adequate, there will be none. This meeting will be informal. If you can show just cause for returning eighteen months late from a twelve-hour mission, no charges will be made. Now, Captain Enright, please deliver your report, beginning at the beginning?" "Certainly. At 1200 hours, on 4 March 2014, I took off from the Earth in the first spacecraft capable of driving faster than the velocity of light. I--" "One moment, Captain," asked one of the men in civilian dress. Enright blinked and saw that the man's name was Harness. E. D. Harness, Senator, Chairman of the Committee on Special Affairs and so forth. Enright nodded, and the senator went on: "My scientific knowledge is sketchy. I was taught that nothing can exceed the speed of light." "You were taught prior to Bergenholm's discovery of the nullification of mass," smiled Enright. "Mass increases, in accordance with Einstein's equations, as the velocity approaches the speed of light, so that the mass becomes infinite when the velocity of light is reached. But when mass is nullified, or reduced to zero--" Billy Enright spread his hands amusedly, "--you can multiply it all night and a hundred billion times zero is still zero." "And the drive?" "A standard reaction motor of the rocket type. Since the ship's mass is zero, its inertia is also zero and therefore the thrusting force of an infant can move zero mass and inertia if need be." Senator Harness nodded. "Then with any kind of reaction thrust you could achieve infinite velocity because the mass and inertia are zero?" "If we were passing through a completely unresisting medium, what you say would be true. But even the deepest part of interstellar space still contains a good many atoms per cubic centimeter. We found this almost-perfect vacuum a resisting medium to a spacecraft going faster than light." "And so what was your estimated velocity?" "About sixty-three light years per hour," replied Billy Enright. The senator nodded as though he were satisfied, but he asked one more question: "Captain Enright, do you know the main purpose of your mission?" "Certainly. Until the discovery of the faster than light drive, mankind was forever trapped on the Earth. One by one we have landed on the several planets and their satellites only to find them hopelessly airless, poisonous of atmosphere, utterly cold and inhospitable, or deadly to human life in other ways. The explosive increase of Earth's population made it necessary to find another frontier, another hope for colonization and expansion. The massless space drive offered this hope to us. My mission was to test the drive, to test the crossing of interstellar space, and if at all possible return with some tale of hope."