BRAIN TEASER
BY TOM GODWIN
How can a ship travel both forward and
backward and sideways in two different directions,
be going twice as fast as the speed of
light—and still be completely motionless?
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, October 1956.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Carl Engle stood aside as the flight preparation crew filed out of theArgosy's airlock. Barnes was the last; fat and bald and squintingagainst the brightness of the Arizona sun.
"All set, Carl," he said. "They had us to check and countercheck,especially the drives."
Engle nodded. "Good. Ground Control reports the Slug cruiser stillcircling seven hundred miles out and they think the Slugs suspectsomething."
"Damned centipedes!" Barnes said. "I still say they're telepathic." Helooked at his watch. Zero hour minus twenty-six minutes. "Good luck,boy, and I hope this space warp dingus works like they think it will."
He waddled down the boarding ramp and Engle went through the airlock,frowning a little as he threw the switches that would withdraw the rampand close the airlock behind him. Barnes' implied doubt in the successof the space warp shuttle was not comforting. If the shuttle failedto work, the Argosy would be on the proverbial spot with the Slugcruiser eager to smear it well thereupon....
Access to the control room was up through the room that housed thespace warp shuttle. Dr. Harding, the tall, bristle-browed physicist,and his young assistant, Garvin, looked up briefly as he entered thenreturned their attention to their work. The master computer, borrowedfrom M.I.T., stood like a colossal many-dialed refrigerator along onewall. A protective railing around it bore a blunt KEEP OUT sign andit was never left unwatched. Garvin was seated before it, his fingersflitting over the keyboard and the computer's answer panel replyingwith strange mathematical symbols.
The space warp shuttle sat in the middle of the room, a cubeapproximately two-thirds of a meter along the edge, studded with dialsand knobs and surmounted by a ball of some shining silvery alloy. Dr.Harding was talking into the transdimensional communicator mountedbeside the shuttle.
Engle went on to the computer and waited outside the railing untilGarvin finished with his work and turned in his seat to face him.
"The last check question," Garvin said. "Now to sweat out the lasttwenty minutes."
"If you've got the time, how about telling me about the shuttle,"said Engle, "I've been kept in the dark about it; but from what Iunderstand, the shuttle builds up a field around the ship, with thesilver ball as the center of the field, and this field goes intoanother dimension called the 'space warp'."
"Ah—it could be described in that manner," Garvin said, smiling alittle. "A clear description could not be made without the use ofseveral special kinds of mathematics, but you might say this field innormal space is like a bubble under water. The air bubble seeks its ownelement, rises rapidly until it emerges into free air—in this case,the space warp. This transition into the warp is almost instantaneousand the shuttle automatically ceases operation when the warp is fullyentered. The shuttle is no longer needed; the hypothetical bubble nolonger exists—it has found its own element and merged with it."
"I know that a light-hour of travel in the warp is supposed to beequi