Science Fiction [antikvár]

ISAAK ASIMOV TAKE A MATCHSpace was black; black all around in every direction. There was nothing to be seen; not a star.It was not beeause there were no starsActually the thought that there might be no stars, literally no stars, had chilled Per Hanson's vitals. It was the old nightmare that rested just barely subliminally beneath the skin of every deep-spacer's brain.*When you took the lump* through the tachyon-utiiverse,* how sure were you where you would emerge? The tiraing and quantity of the energy input might be as tightly controlled as you liked, and your Fusionist* might be the best in space, but the uncertainty principle* reigned supreme and there was always the chance, even the inevitability of a random miss.And by way of tachyons, a paper-thin miss might be a thou-sand light-years.*What, then, if you landed nowhere; or at least so distant from anywhere that nothing could possibly ever guide you to know-ledge of your own position and nothing, therefore, could guide you back to anywhere?Impossible, said the pundits. There was 110 place in the universe from which the quasars* could not be seen, and from those alone you could position yourself. Besides, the chance that in the course of ordinary Jumps mere chance would take you outside the galaxy was only one in about ten millión, and to the distance of, say, the Andromeda galaxy* or Maffei 1, perhaps one in a quadriHion.Forget it. said the pundits.So when a ship comes out of its Jump, and returns from the weird paradoxes of the faster-than-light tachyons to the healthy we-know-it-all of all the tardyons* from protons down to protons up,* there must be stars to be seen. If they are not seen neverthe-