Free Wine of the Dreamers by John D. MacDonald

and main control panels. We are in the control room. The three chairs there are on gymbals mounted on hydraulic pedestals designed to compensate for sudden increments in acceleration. They are similar to, but an improvement over, the systems previously used. Impulse screen mounted, as you can see, but not yet tied into either manual or computer control.”
    Leeber studied the main control panel and said,“Looks like a king size A-six, and not too much different from the A-five. Where are the directional jets?”
    “Eliminated in favor of a twenty-ton gyro that can be turned through a ten-degree arc. In free space it will turn her in any desired attitude. A lot of weight to boost, but not much less than standard attitude jet installation and the necessary fuel controls, and we save a lot by eliminating the initial lift-off with chemical fuels, so we have no booster stages to jettison on the way out.”
    “Initial lift on atomic drive? Poison the air?”
    “With a very short-life emission. Launch site will be clean in ten hours. At half-diameter outbound, they switch to standard A fuel, and keep it on CA. That means that—–”
    “—–at twelve thousand miles out they go right onto the same old A-six atomic propulsion fuel and stay in constant acceleration. I’m not a civilian, Doctor. So this marvelous ship is just one big son of a bitch of an oversized A-six with a flywheel gyro, a short-life mix for takeoff. Wonderful!” His smile was ironic, his eyes cold.
    “With one more little change, Major. Eighty days of CA will put her clear of the system. Then they switch to Beatty Drive. Drive is an inaccurate word, but we haven’t come up with a better one yet. I worked with Beatty and ran the team that completed his equations after he died two years ago. Do you have any background in theoretical physics?”
    “Some exposure. Try me, Doctor.”
    “What does ‘frames of reference’ mean to you?”
    “The old analogy about three elevators and one man in each one. Elevator A is going up at top speed, Elevator B is going down slowly and Elevator C is stuck between floors. Each one is moving at a different speed in relation to each of the other two.”
    “Very good. But you have one motionless elevator. Take it a step further. Your motionless one is at zero velocity. Okay, where is the motionless point in space? You can be hanging in space absolutely motionless in relation to one star, but moving at ten thousand miles per secondin relation to a star in some other direction. On a theoretical basis you would find a motionless point in space by computing the velocity and direction of movement of all the stars in all the galaxies and finding that point from which all those velocities both toward you and away from you, on whatever angle of inclination or declination, would average out to zero. If we had the math to solve a problem with an infinite number of unknowns, we do not have all the knowns to feed into it, due to the temporal limits—and physical limits—of observation. Are you with it?”
    “I think I … Well, keep going.”
    “Here is the heart of it. Beatty called that the space-frame—the problem of finding the zero point in space. So he made the assumption there must also be a time-frame. He pictured a universe curved in upon itself in the Einsteinian concept, but composed of not only varying velocities and directions, but also varying temporal relationships. From this he extrapolated the idea that an average of the time relationships would give you a zero place, a place where time does not exist, just as an average of speed-relationships would give you a zero place where movement does not exist. So he applied that theory to the paradox of the expanding universe, and his equations did what the red shift ‘tired light’ theories failed to do. He proved that the apparent expansion was in fact the interrelationship of the velocity of light with a varying time warp throughout the observable galaxies, with