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Mauris with sarcasm. “I don’t think I’ve ever visited a spiral nebula before.”
    Kobler grinned. “One million six hundred thousand light-years,” he said. “Quite a little hop when you come to think of it.”
    “How long do you think it will take.”
    The physicist’s grin broadened. “I don’t know,” he said happily. “Probably just that hypothetically fatal meta-second.”
    Mauris restrained himself with an effort. “I’d appreciate a brief exposition of the theory,” he said. “It might be useful.”
    Kobler helped himself to more whiskey, leaned back in his chair, and regarded the ceiling. “Essentially,” he began, “it involves my private theory of matter, which also involves the stress characteristic of space and the so-called temporal regression.”
    “Proceed,” said Mauris. “For a moment I thought you were going to get complicated.”
    Kobler ignored him. “You understand, of course,” he continued, “that matter is a form of locked-up energy?”
    “Yes.”
    “Good. I now have news for you. Energy is simply a form of locked-up space. There is, from the physicist’s point of view, quite a reasonable amount of energy in the cosmos: there is also a devil of a lot of space. Now there is, as well, the curious phenomenon of the expansion and unwrinkling of space alongside the actual diminution of energy.”
    “You wouldn’t be throwing overboard the first and second laws of thermodynamics, would you?” interrupted the Captain mildly.
    Kobler admired his own fingernails complacently.
    “Child’s play,” he said. “Entropy and the first and second laws are all washed up. Funny thing, when I was a student I instinctively knew there was something wrong.
    . . . But back to the point. I have established a definite coefficient—the practical application of which means, my friend, that we too can adopt the charming habit of energy. We can submerge in space. Just as energy, when it thinks nobody is looking, opens a little door into the fifth dimension and smartly sidesteps all detection by becoming space, so we can play the same trick. . . . Only we can go one better: we can become energy again. Which, in effect, means that we can knock the mainspring out of time. . . . Because, Captain Mauris, by becoming virtually nonexistent, we escape the temporal regression. That, in a simpler fashion, is why you were able to hop round Beta Centauri and swallow seven hundred light-years. And of the three hours twenty-seven minutes it took, you spent most of the time surfacing so that Egon could panic over his star maps.”
    “That is true,” said Mauris. “But—if you will forgive a simple space captain for pointing out the obvious—we were functioning in a known energy system. ... By making the new target M 81, you are postulating a jump clean out of the local energy pattern.”
    “Not out of, but through  corrected the physicist. “On the Beta Centauri trip you were still slightly limited by a temporal regression. This time the deceleration will be so sharp as to make a total breakthrough. We shall make a neat hole in our own space frame and enter sub-space. We shall become a pattern of space on the frame of sub-space. Then we shall localize our return breakthrough when a pretty little instrument that I have programmed for M 81 recognizes the surface energy pattern.”
    “Suppose the programming fails.”
    Kobler laughed. “As it is the first true cosmometer, there is the possibility. But you can take it from me that it is theoretically perfect.”
    Captain Mauris thought nostalgically of the Amazonian hinterland. After nearly a minute’s silence, he said, “It’s nice to feel that somebody’s confident, anyway.”
    “Space has a very definite direction,” pursued Kobler. “Its vortices are the galactic leaks. In some respects, we can regard the sub-echoes of nebulae as stepping-stones. In the extragaiactic jump, it’s chiefly a question of defining