He was silent. Obviously it was hopeless; no matter how long the Lies Incorporated professional and ultra-veteran space-pilot kept the huge liner the Omphalos lost between planets, the components would be "held up unavoidably," as the invoices, marked back-order, would read.
"I think," Freya said presently, "that your problem is not the mere obtaining of deep-sleep components. That can be handled; there are ways... we, for instance, can — although this will cost you a good deal of money eventually — pick them up on the blackmarket. Your problem, Rachmael — "
"I know," he said. His problem was not how to get to the Fomalhaut system, to its ninth planet, Whale's Mouth, which was Terra's sole thriving colony-world. In fact his problem was not the eighteen-year voyage at all.
His problem was —
Why go at all, when Dr. von Einem's Telpor construct, available at a nominal cost at any of Trails of Hoffman's many retail outlets on Terra, made the trip a mere fifteen-minute minor journey, and within financial reach of even the most modest, income-wise speaking, Terran family?
Aloud he said, "Freya, the trip by Telpor to Whale's Mouth — it sounds fine." And forty million Terran citizens had taken advantage of it. And the aud and vid reports returning — via the Telpor construct — all told glowingly of a world not overcrowded, of tall grass, of odd but benign animals, of new and lovely cities built by robot-assists taken across at UN-expense to Whale's Mouth. "But — "
"But," Freya said, "the peculiar fact is that it's a one-way trip."
Instantly he nodded. "Yes, that's it. No one can come back."
"That's easily explained. The Sol system is located at the axis of the universe; the recession of the extra-galactic nebulae demonstrates von Einem's Theorem One that — "