“Yes.”
“Give it twelve microseconds to drop the ship below the speed of light and I have still one full microsecond for recordings!”
“Shucks,” he grinned. “Way way back they used microsecond pulses to range aircraft, and they got to the point where a microsecond of time could be accurately split into several million parts of its own. Besides, I made those instruments!”
“Q.E.D.,” said Edith Ward quietly. “But how are you going to develop a monopolar magnetic field without the magnetostrictive effect? The prime consideration is not the field, but the fact that aligning the planetary orbits means that two things tend to occupy the same place at the same time. That isn’t—they tell me—possible.”
“Too bad the reverse isn’t true,” he said.
“You mean the chance of something occupying two plac
