" 'F. X. Urqhardt, commanding Lewis and Clark.'"

My jaw dropped. Why, the silent creeper! All the time I had been lambasting him in my mind he had been arguing the home office into canceling our orders ... no wonder he had used code; you don't say in clear language that your ship is a mess and your crew has gone to pot. Not if you can help it, you don't. I didn't even resent that he had not trusted us freaks to respect the security of communications; I wouldn't have trusted myself, under the circumstances.

Janet's eyes were shining... like a woman in love, or like a relativistic mathematician who has just found a new way to work a transformation. "So they've done it!" she said in a hushed voice.

"Done what?" I asked. She was certainly taking it in a big way; I hadn't realized she was that anxious to get home.

"Tommie, don't you see? They've done it, they've done it, they've applied irrelevance. Dr. Babcock was right."

"Huh?"

"Why, it's perfectly plain. What kind of a ship can get here in a month? An irrelevant ship, of course. One that is faster than light." She frowned. "But I don't see why it should take even a month. It shouldn't take any time at all.

It wouldn't use time."

I said, "Take it easy, Janet. I'm stupid this morning—I didn't have much sleep last night. Why do you say that ship

... uh, the Serendipity... is faster than light? That's impossible."

"Tommie, Tommie... look, dear, if it was an ordinary ship, in order to rendezvous with us here, it would have had to have left Earth over sixty-three years ago."

"Well, maybe it did."

"Tommie! It couldn't possibly—because that long ago non body knew that we would be here now. How could they?"

I figured back. Sixty-three Greenwich years ago... mama, that would have been sometime during our first peak. Janet seemed to be right; only an incredible optimist or a fortune teller would have sent a ship from Earth at that time to meet us here now. "I don't understand it."

"Don't you see, Tommie? I've explained it to you, I know I have. Irrelevance. Why, you telepaths were the reason the investigation started; you proved that "simultaneity' was an admissible concept ,...nd the inevitable logical consequence was that time and space do not exist."

I felt my head begin to ache. "They don't? Then what is that we seem to be having breakfast in?"

"Just a mathematical abstraction, dear. Nothing more." She smiled and looked motherly. "Poor 'Sentimental Tommie.' You worry too much."

I suppose Janet was right, for we made rendezvous with F. S. Serendipity twenty-nine Greenwich days later. We spent the time moseying out at a half gravity to a locus five billion miles Galactic-north of Beta Ceti, for it appeared that the Sarah did not want to come too close to the big star. Still, at sixty-three light-years, five billion miles is close shooting—a very near miss. We also spent the time working like mischief to arrange and prepare specimens and in collating data. Besides that, Captain Urqhardt suddenly discovered, now that .we were expecting visitors, that lots and lots of things had not been cleaned and polished lately. He even inspected staterooms, which I thought was snoopy.

The Sarah had a mind reader aboard, which helped when it came time to close rendezvous. She missed us by nearly two light-hours; then their m-r and myself exchanged coordinates (referred to Beta Ceti) by relay back Earthside and got each other pinpointed in a hurry. By radar and radio alone we could have fiddled around for a week—if we had ever made contact at all.

But once that was done, the Sarah turned out to be a fast ship, lively enough to bug your eyes out. She was in our lap, showing on our short-range radar, as I was reporting the coordinates she had just had to the Captain. An hour later she was made fast and sealed to our lock. And she was a little ship. The Elsie had seemed huge when I first joined her; then after a while she was just the right size, or a little cramped for some purposes. But the Sarah wouldn't have made a decent Earth-Moon shuttle.

Mr. Whipple came aboard first. He was an incredible character to find in space; he even carried a briefcase. But he took charge at once. He had two men with him and they got busy in a small comportment in the cargo deck. They knew just what compartment they wanted; we had to clear potatoes out of it in a hurry. They worked in there half a day, installing something they called a "null-field generator," working in odd clothes made entirely of hair-fine wires, which covered them like mummies. Mr. Whipple stayed in the door, watching while they worked and smoking a cigar—it was the first I had seen in three years and the smell of it made me ill. The relativists stuck close to him, exchanging excited comments, and so did the engineers, except that they looked baffled and slightly disgusted. I heard Mr., Regato say, "Maybe so. But a torch is reliable. You can depend on a torch."

Captain Urqhardt watched it all, Old Stone Face in person.

At last Mr. Whipple put out his cigar and said, "Well, that's that, Captain. Thompson will stay and take you in and Bjorkenson will go on in the Sarah. I'm afraid you will have to put up with me, too, for I am going back with you."

Captain Urqhardt's face was a gray-white. "Do I understand, sir, that you are relieving me of my command?"

"What? Good heavens, Captain, what makes you say that?"

"You seem to have taken charge of my ship... on behalf of the home office. And now you tell me that this man... er, Thompson—will take us in."

"Gracious, no. I'm sorry. I'm not used to the niceties of field work; I've been in the home office too long. But just think of Thompson as a... mmm, a sailing master for you. That's it; he'll be your pilot. But no one is displacing you; you'll remain in command until you can return home and turn over your ship. Then she'll be scrapped, of course."

Mr. Regato said in a queer, high voice, "Did you say "scrapped," Mr. Whipple?" I felt my stomach give a twist. Scrap the Elsie? No!

"Eh? I spoke hastily. Nothing has been decided Possibly she will be kept as a museum. In fact, that is a good idea." He took out a notebook and wrote in it. He put it away and said, "And now, Captain, if you will, I'd like to speak to all your people. There isn't much time."

Captain Urqhardt silently led him back to the mess deck.

When we were assembled, Mr. Whipple smiled and said, "I'm not much at speechmaking. I simply want to thank you all, on behalf of the Foundation, and explain what we are doing. I won't go into detail, as I am not a scientist; I am an administrator, busy with the liquidation of Project Lebensraum, of which you are part. Such salvage and rescue operations as this are necessary; nevertheless, the Foundation is anxious to free the Serendipity, and her sister ships, the Irrelevant, the Infinity, and Zero, for their proper work, that is to say, their survey of stars in the surrounding space."

Somebody gasped. "But that's what we were doing!"

"Yes, yes, of course. But times change. One of the null-field ships can visit more stars in a year than a torchship can visit in a century. You'll be happy to know that the Zero working alone has located seven Earth-type planets this past month."

It didn't make me happy.

Uncle Alfred McNeil leaned forward and said in a soft, tragic voice that spoke for all of us, "Just a moment, sir. Are you telling us that what we did... wasn't necessary?"

Mr. Whipple looked startled. "No, no, no! I'm terribly sorry if I gave that impression. What you did was utterly necessary, or there would not be any null ships today. Why, that's like saying that what Columbus did wasn't necessary, simply because we jump across oceans as if they were mud puddles nowadays."