When the acceleration stress decreased he descended to the hold feeling suddenly chilled. Close to the beryllium bulkheads heat was lost more readily than in other sections. Guhn made his way through the dimly lit, lightly storaged passages, skirting bales of priceless _baka_ silk, hogsheads of delicious platinum-hued wine from grapes grown in the soil of Rigel IX, and lead-sheathed crates of long-lived curium isotopes, native to Rigel's fourth planet. He approached the compartment that contained the skags. Here he halted, sensitive to the enigma which had baffled the galaxy. The strange frozen skags constituted the first and only evidence of a non-humanoid culture yet found. They were known to have been intelligent. Their cities, lacy things of steel and plastic, still reached for clouds on the slag-red sands of Rigel IV, silent and deserted. In vaults beneath cities' surface had been discovered the last few inhabitants, perfectly preserved in death. Controlling his repulsion, Charlie Guhn studied the three skags lying in composed attitudes within their globe-shaped transparent shells. Blue tentacles stuck out of bulbous heads like medusae. Inhumanly majestic faces, but lacking nostrils and ears, were supported by strong granite bodies with abnormally long arms and legs. At first glance, they appeared to be perverted human mutations. In their repose, they seemed almost alive. Unable to look longer, Guhn climbed the nearest ladder. At the top, a crewman commented to him: "Must've been frightful in life, them skags. We'd had a battle, then, sir; a real bloody battle." The ship's speaker vibrated with Mark Caldwell's magnified voice: "Attention, all hands. We are entering minus point." In his cabin, Capt. Jock Warren mumbled in his narcol stupor but his burly body never stirred. * * * * * Veteran astrogator though he was, Mark Caldwell always dreaded the approach of minus point. You never could predict what effect the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction might produce just before the jump into hyperspace when the laws of the Einsteinian universe broke down. But only at minus point could warper coils take over from blast engines. At minus point, which set in at 186,100 miles a second, time started to reverse itself and flow backwards. Bending of the space-time continuum distorted entropy, causing an indescribably extended vessel and occupants to actually grow younger. Because human minds were unable to function during this period of cellular regeneration, robot pilots took over immediately. Two hours past the barrier, the crew would awake--at least two hours younger than at the moment of plunge. Relays shuffled and clutches locked, clamping the Star Rover's directional controls, while Mark Caldwell fed the ship's heading figures into the mercury vat memory of the pilot. Then, he prepared for the big sleep. When consciousness returned, his brain would no longer be fogged.