"I don't think Newton was trying to be snobbily semantic," laughed Hendricks. "Besides, his Law is a translation from the Latin, and at that time they weren't even sure of space, let alone subspace and space two, et cetera." "I've always wondered about the conservation of energy and the problem of how gravitic attraction couples into that. It could be, of course, that the universal attraction comes from the fact that all the universe was once a single body that exploded because of its own mass-warp. Energy driving the mass apart during the formation of the universe--which is still expanding--and because it took work to separate one body from another, the conservation of energy dictates that they undo that work to get them back together. Since our project was not a part of subspace, no expanding work had been done on it, and therefore no potential energy had been stored which would be released by gravity taking place." Hendricks smiled. "It's as good a theory as the next," he said. "But is it solving the Sscantovian problem?" "No, but I have an idea that may. We can set up our warping beam and transfer the resultant forces in the same manner as we transmit other energy. We can't jerk the insides out of a star, nor can we compress the matter there. But there is nothing that says that we cannot change the physical constants prevailing in a certain sphere of influence, and thus warp anything within that sphere into subspace." "Sounds good. So instead of pulling the middle out of a star we'll just rotate the middle into subspace. Well we have our work cut out for us," smiled Hendricks. "I'll get a corps of techs on subspace, and a gang working on the space two. We'll run up a couple of spaces, too, just in case. I'll have a crew go to work on the subspace matter, and we'll eventually have a crew working on admixtures of extra spatial matter with spatial matter. We have enough work for ten lifetimes. Y'know, Billy, I'm going to set a slew of brand new college kids to tinkering with the subspace problem under the direction of a hand-picked crew of elders. They've got a field that isn't over-crowded, anyway." Billy scratched his head. "Look, Jim, I have an idea. Superdrive is fine stuff for batting around the Solar Sector. A run of fifty light-years, though, is a reasonable jaunt, and Sscantoo is off about a hundred and fifty light-years. Now if this time-difference in subspace is workable, we might be able to get to Sscantoo in jig time." "I suppose so. But remember that this jig time you speak of is real time to you. To someone in space, you'll make the hop in record time, but to someone on the ship with you, the same time of a spatial trip will ensue."