"Except yours, you're trying to say," Jak broke in. "You haven't been sparing yourself any, I notice, and I know enough doctoring to know you're not getting well as fast...." "Pooh, I'm all right, and I'm used to ship accelerations." Mr. Carver turned his head toward his son and made himself grin. "Even under these three G's, I can still get up and lick you, even with a half-healed leg." Jon realized at once that his father was warning him not to worry their mother any more, and forced himself to reply, pretending to be shamefaced, "Yes, sir, you could at that. I'll be good." But the next morning, by the ship's chronoms, after they had fully awakened from a night of tortured sleep, Jon studied his instruments for some time, then reported to his father, "Bogin's still catching up. He's only about four hundred million behind us now." "But how can he possibly be?" Jak demanded. "Probably staying on three G's or better all the time," Jon answered. "Or else he has a different means of propulsion than we have that affects his whole ship and contents, including crew," his father said slowly. "I don't know what it could be. But theoretically there are a lot of different ways of traveling faster than any we've learned how to use yet." "But how could they, Mr. C.?" his wife gasped. "I don't pretend to know much about such things, but I thought that better fuels merely meant increased efficiency in the use of the engines, not an increase of speed. Isn't it acceleration that makes the speed faster?" He turned his head with difficulty--at three gravities acceleration their apparent weight was tripled, and his body now "weighed" over five hundred and fifty pounds, instead of its normal one eighty plus! "You're both right and wrong, Honey," he explained. "The better the fuel, the less we have to carry for the same distance traveled, and that makes our thrust-to-mass ratio less. We can go home faster than we came out here, because some of our fuel is gone and we have less mass. But that's not what I'm talking about. Theoretically, as I said, there are other ways, none of which our scientists have yet figured out how to use, as far as I know. There could be a complete or partial nullification of gravity or of inertia. Or some type of space warp. Or some method of 'cutting through' the other dimensions, so we could go almost instantly from one point in space to another." Jak gasped. "Why, how's that possible, Father?" Jon answered quickly. "I can illustrate, I think. Imagine a sheet of paper, with a dot near either end. The normal way to connect them would be a straight line drawn from one to the other--which is analogous to the way we travel in space now. What Pop's talking about would be the same as if we folded the paper so the two dots touched, and moved from one to the other direct." "That wouldn't be...." "That's silly." The two phrases came simultaneously from Jak and his mother.