ink
you're going to order me around. I'm not going to--"

"Take it easy." Reinhart fell into step beside the bigger man. They
passed through the check and into the auxiliary labs. "No immediate
coercion will be exerted over you or your staff. You're free to
continue your work as you see fit--for the present. Let's get this
straight. My concern is to integrate your work with our total social
needs. As long as your work is sufficiently productive--"

Reinhart stopped in his tracks.

"Pretty, isn't he?" Sherikov said ironically.

"What the hell is it?

"Icarus, we call him. Remember the Greek myth? The legend of Icarus.
Icarus flew.... This Icarus is going to fly, one of these days."
Sherikov shrugged. "You can examine him, if you want. I suppose this
is what you came here to see."

Reinhart advanced slowly. "This is the weapon you've been working on?"

"How does he look?"

Rising up in the center of the chamber was a squat metal cylinder, a
great ugly cone of dark gray. Technicians circled around it, wiring up
the exposed relay banks. Reinhart caught a glimpse of endless tubes
and filaments, a maze of wires and terminals and parts criss-crossing
each other, layer on layer.

"What is it?" Reinhart perched on the edge of a workbench, leaning his
big shoulders against the wall. "An idea of Jamison Hedge--the same
man who developed our instantaneous interstellar vidcasts forty years
ago. He was trying to find a method of faster than light travel when
he was killed, destroyed along with most of his work. After that ftl
research was abandoned. It looked as if there were no future in it."

"Wasn't it shown that nothing could travel faster than light?"

"The interstellar vidcasts do! No, Hedge developed a valid ftl drive.
He managed to propel an object at fifty times the speed of light. But
as the object gained speed, its length began to diminish and its mass
increased. This was in line with familiar twentieth-century concepts
of mass-energy transformation. We conjectured that as Hedge's object
gained velocity it would continue to lose length and gain mass until
its length became nil and its mass infinite. Nobody can imagine such
an object."

"Go on."

"But what actually occurred is this. Hedge's object continued to lose
length and gain mass until it reached the theoretical limit of
velocity, the speed of light. At that point the object, still gaining
speed, simply ceased to exist. Having no length, it ceased to