First thing in an emergency: shut up the passengers so you can think. Now, what had happened? She had a suspicion: Allen’s experiment had blown up. It had to have. She pulled herself back to the aft windows to get a look down into the cargo bay where the getaway special canisters were attached, next to the forward bulkhead. She couldn’t see that close in, but there was no evidence of an explosion, nothing that could have jolted the shuttle enough to flip it over. Besides, she realized, nothing had. They would have felt the motion. The Earth had simply disappeared.

A long list of emergency procedures reeled through her mind. Fire control, blowout, toxic gasses, medical emergencies—none of them applied here. There was nothing in the book about the Earth disappearing. But there was always one standing order that never changed. In any emergency, communicate with the ground.

“Don’t use the jets,” she said to Carl; then, turning to the audio terminal, she flipped it to transmit and said, “Control, this is Discovery, do you copy?”

Allen cleared his throat and said, “I don’t think you’ll be able to raise them.”

Judy shot him a look that shut him up and called again. “Control, this is Discovery. We have a problem. Do you copy?”

After a couple of seconds she switched to another frequency and tried again, but still got no response. She was at the end of her checklist. What now?

Allen had been trying to say something all along. She turned around to face him and said, “All right. What did you do?”

“I—ah, I moved us a little bit. Don’t worry! It worked beautifully.”

“You moved us. How?”

“Hyperdrive.”

2

There was a moment of silence before Judy burst out laughing. She couldn’t help it. Hyperdrive? But her laughter faded as the truth of the situation started to hit her.