-SALOON AT THE EDGE OF EVERYWHERE-

Chapter Twenty Seven

Let me take this opportunity to tell you a few things you may not know about Nexus Point travel. Nexus Points are very common. The people of Earth were unaware of these marvelous transit locations because Nexus Points are actually quite small. In fact they are downright unimpressive in so far as their appearance might lead you to believe. They do not show up on telescopes. They are so easy to overlook that very few races have discovered them without help. This is how it ended up that new races are invited to use the Nexus Points and the Hubs when they achieve faster-than-light travel. You can join the club if you can get to the clubhouse, so to speak. In fat Humans are the first race to achieve this goal without actually meeting this requirement. But it is in what the Nexus Points do that their impressiveness resides.

A Nexus Point will take any object up to the size of a very small moon, and put it in any other Nexus Point, providing it is moving at the proper speed. But it retains the original object at the starting point at the same time. In essence it is making a copy, a duplicate of something and sending it out, but keeping the original copy, at least for a week or so.

I will not bore you with the technical details of these phenomenons, not that I could even if we both wished it. Because frankly I have no idea how the darn things work. I even harbor a suspicion that nobody, not even the multidimensional beings like the Flying Pickles, know how they actually work. It has something to do with the fact that time absolutely does not exist between or inside of the Nexus Points. So when a ship passes through, even after it exits out the other side, it is still somehow inside the Nexus Point, existing in two places at once. And this means that even if you are not lined up correctly and fail to arrive at your proper Nexus destination, as in the case of the Bats when they took a wrong turn and discovered Earth, you can still pop back to your starting Nexus Point. Provided that you can match you original course and speed exactly and in the opposite direction, that is.

Nexus is like having a door in your town, maybe located in the park near the center of town. But when you pass through this particular door, you come out in India, or Thailand, or wherever, depending on how fast you were walking and the angle at which you were walking as you passed through the door. And if, that is, you could walk really, really fast.

But the incredible part of Nexus, using the same magic door example, is that for a period of a week or so, while you are gallivanting around India or Thailand or wherever, all you have to do to return to the door in your home town is to run at exactly the same unlikely speed and at precisely the same angle of trajectory. Even if you are nowhere near where you stepped out of the door in the first place. And this, when done by a ship to reach a Nexus Point, is called ‘popping’. At least that is what it is called now that everybody loves the English language so much.

The other remarkable aspect of Nexus travel is that if two ships are linked together, that is to say touching in anyway, or held together with magnetic docking arms as is usually done, then when the one ship pops, the other will be transported with it.

In other words, new star ships do not technically require faster-than-light- engines to use the Nexus Points. They can piggyback with a ship that has passed through a Nexus. This means that boxy tugs and freighters can be built cheaply and used to do most of the routine moving of goods and merchandise. They make the rounds of the Hubs, which are near all the Nexus Points, and the various galactic civilizations. And they don’t have to be built to withstand passing through atmospheres and hard takeoffs and landings.

Now obviously FTL is still desirable. FTL is also rather confusing, and has something to do with bending light rays (humans were always thinking ‘push’, but you really have to ‘pull’). Unless you are just travelling from Nexus to Nexus, you might want to go and visit planets and places far removed from the Nexus Points. And also there is the fact that to do an unassisted Nexus transit, your ship has to be able to reach speeds of close to 1.8 times the speed of light, depending on your Nexus transit vectors. Also, with no FTL, if you ever miss one of your vectors and end up getting lost as the Bats so often do, and then you misplace your return vector coordinates somehow, you would have a long, slow trip back to anyplace at all. Even with FTL, you would be more or less stuck out there.

Expert ship Captains have mastered ‘popping’ in and out of regular space close to any planet they need to visit, but their margin for error is not large. When you exit your transit you are still traveling at your original speed, so traffic control at crowded Nexus Points is critical. This accounts for the existence of the Hubs.

So I hope this has served to clear up some of those questions that I am sure you have been meaning to ask.