Free Wine of the Dreamers by John D. MacDonald Page A

the effect more apparent the greater the warp—i.e., in the most distant galaxies. I think I’ve lost you.”
    “Afraid so.”
    “Try it this way then. Until Beatty’s work we believed that maximum attainable velocity would always be a fractional percentage point under the speed of light itself, because according to the Fitzgerald equations, at the speed of light the contraction of mass is infinite. Beatty gave us a way to bypass that barrier by thrusting a ship into another frame of reference of time. Here is our standard simplistic analogy. You are driving from El Paso to NewYork. It will take you three days. You leave on Monday. You expect to get to New York on Wednesday. So as soon as you are outside the El Paso city limits you push a little button on the dashboard labeled ‘Wednesday.’ And there is the skyline of New York, right down the road.”
    “Didn’t … the Fitzgerald equations say that time contracts along with mass in ratio to velocity?”
    “Excellent, Major! Beatty’s equations showed that the time gradient between different systems, instead of having to be traversed at nearly light speed, can be capsuled into an abrupt time shift, just as when you drive across from one time zone into the next.”
    “Your jumps would be a little bigger than Monday to Wednesday, I’d imagine.”
    “The increments are in standard segments of one hundred years. But don’t think of it as a hundred years passing in a flash. It is more a distance measurement. You arrive in New York at the precise moment that you left El Paso.”
    “So when do you know when to make the jump, how far you’ll jump, and where you’ll be when you get there?”
    Bard Lane shrugged and smiled. “That’s what took seven months of programming and three months of integral and digital computer time. Then we built the control panels according to the results of the calculations.”
    “And that nut smashed them?”
    “Do you mean Doctor Kornal? He did. He is back on the job. My decision to take him back will stand up, so don’t step over the line you seem to be edging too close to.”
    “Me? Hell, let’s be friends. Life is too short. It’s your risk, not mine. What do we look at next?”
    “Dinner. I’ll take you through the labs tomorrow morning.”
    “Where do I find the action?”
    “I’ll point out the club on our way back down to the launch pad.”

FIVE
    Bard Lane sat on the edge of his bed. It was after midnight on the same day that he had taken Major Leeber on the tour of inspection.
    He sat and little rivulets of fear ran through his mind the way that rain will trickle erratically down a window-pane. The night was cool and the wind that came through the screen touched his naked chest and shoulders, but it did not stop the perspiration that made an oiled sheen on his face.
    It was like a return to childhood, to the long-dead nights of terror. The scream. “Mommy, Mommy! It was a moldy man and he was sitting on my bed!”
    “It’s all right. It was just a dream, dear.”
    “He was here! He was! I saw him, Mommy.”
    “Shh, you’ll wake your father. I’ll sit here and hold your hand until you get back to sleep.”
    Sleep voice. “Well he was here.”
    He shivered violently. Now there was no one to call. There was someone you should call, but that might mean … defeat.
    You can fight all the outside enemies in the world, but what if the enemy is in your own mind? What then?
    It was a decision to make. He made it. He dressed quickly, snatched a leather jacket from the closet hook, shouldered his way into it as he left his quarters. From the slope he looked down on the project buildings. A thin moon rode high, silvering the dark buildings. He knew that inside the darkness there were lights, hum of activity, night shifts in the labs in the caves.
    Sharan Inly had a room in the women’s barracks. He walked down the slope and across the street. The girl atthe switchboard was reading a magazine. She glanced up and