g wires enough to see him, the
scientist who had had more than one paper published "in an amateur way."

"Dr. Bernard Kendall?" he asked, rising.

"Yes, sir. Late Buck Kendall, lieutenant of the IP. I quit and got Cole
here to quit with me, so we could see you."

"Unusual tactics. I've had several men join up to get an interview with
me." McLaurin smiled.

"Yes, I can imagine that, but we had to see you in a hurry. A hidebound
old rapscallion by the name of Jim Warren picked us up out by Pluto,
floating around in a six-man tender. We made some reports to him, but he
wouldn't believe, and he wouldn't send them through--so we had to send
ourselves through. Sir, this system is about to be attacked by some
extra-systemic race. The IP-T-247 was so attacked, her crew killed off,
and the ship itself carried away."

"I got the report Captain Jim Warren sent through, stating it was a gang
of space pirates. Now what makes you believe otherwise?"

"That ship that attacked us, attacked with a neutron gun, a gun that
shot neutrons through the hull of our ship as easily as protons pass
through open space. Those neutrons killed off four of the crew, and
spared us only because we happened to be behind the water tanks. Masses
of hydrogen will stop neutrons, so we lived, and escaped in the tender.
The little tender, lightless, escaped their observation, and we were
picked up. Now, when the 247 had been picked up, and locked into their
ship, that ship started accelerating. It accelerated so fast along my
line of sight that it just dwindled, and--vanished. It didn't vanish in
distance, it vanished _because it exceeded the speed of light_."

"Isn't that impossible?"

"Not at all. It can be done--if you can find some way of escaping from
this space to do it. Now if you could cut across through a higher
dimension, your _projection_ in this dimension might easily exceed the
speed of light. For instance, if I could cut directly through the Earth,
at a speed of one thousand miles an hour, my projection on the surface
would go twelve thousand miles while I was going eight. Similar, if you
could cut _through_ the four dimensional space instead of following its
surface, you'd attain a speed greater than light."

"Might it not still be a space pirate? That's a lot easier to believe,
even allowing your statement that he exceeded the speed of light."

"If you invented a neutron gun which could kill through tungsten walls
without injuring an