And, on cue, Doris delivered her line: “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming. Refreshments will be served in the dining area.”

SOME OF THE politicians and Foundation people retired to a meeting room that Rudy had arranged. Others, who wanted something more substantial than finger sandwiches and oatmeal cookies, fanned out among bars and restaurants to wait out the interval. Jon appeared confident. “It’ll be okay,” he told Rudy. “We’re through the most dangerous part of the process. The one I was worried about.”

“Which one was that?”

“Entry. It’s where the math was most uncertain.”

“I see.”

“If we were going to have a problem, that’s where it would have occurred.”

“You’re sure it didn’t?”

“I’m sure.” They were sitting in armchairs with a potted palm between them. “It would have exploded.”

“At the moment of transition?”

“Yes, indeed,” he said. “Right there in River City. For everybody to see.” He was drinking something. Looked like brandy. “Have no fear, Rudy. It’s over. We’re in business.”

Hutch, who wasn’t personally invested quite the way Rudy was, had taken a wait-and-see attitude. She had a vague sense of how far Pluto was, at least much more so than anyone else present, and her instincts warned her that nobody could get out there in six seconds. Of course, her instincts also told her that getting there inside a minute was just as absurd. It was odd that she’d never thought of it in those terms. All those years, she’d sat down on the bridge, activated the system, and they’d drifted through an interdimensional haze for a few days, or a few weeks, and she would arrive in another star system.

She stopped to think how far Alpha Centauri was. A mere four light-years down the road. It didn’t sound far. Yet, had we been limited to the velocity of the first moon flights, a mission to that dull neighbor would have required more than fifty thousand years. One way.

When asked in Rudy’s presence about her reaction to the experiment, she said she was confident. Everything was going to be fine. It might have been the moment that brought her doubts to the forefront. “I’m never going to get used to this,” she told one reporter. “An armload of dimensions, space-bending drives. Sometimes I think I’d rather have been around when they flew the first planes.”

“I don’t know,” Rudy said. “They weren’t big about women in cockpits in those days.”

AT ABOUT FIVE o’clock, GMT, when they were starting to talk about a late meal, Paul showed up. “My treat,” he said. Nobody gave him an argument.

They knew they’d get no peace in one of Union’s restaurants, so they gathered in Rudy’s room and had pizza sent up. The dinner was a quiet one, everybody watching the clock, lots of talk about how good the food was, people looking out the window and making philosophical remarks about the planet below. They were over one of the oceans, but Rudy had no idea which one.

He hated having to wait for the results. Had it been a Hazeltine flight, they could have used its associated FTL comm system, the hyperlink, and everyone would have known the result within a few minutes. The Locarno had not yet been adapted for a hyperlink. There was no point spending the time and effort until they knew whether the transport system worked. Consequently, they had to wait it out. And radio signals, which crawled along at the speed of light, took forever.

That should be the next project, he decided. If everything turned out all right today. Rudy had already asked Jon whether it could be done. “It’ll be expensive,” he said. “And it’ll take time. But yes. I can’t see any reason why not.”

They watched some of the reports, watched their own interviews, laughed at the things they’d said. “The entire galaxy will be within reach,” Rudy had told New York Online.

“Right.” Paul shook his head. “If you don’t mind three-year missions.”

“That’s still pretty decent,” said Hutch. “The other side of the galaxy and back. In a few years.”

One of the board members, Charles McGonigle, who also headed the Arlington National Bank, chuckled and looked around. “Any volunteers?”

“I’d go,” said Rudy, turning serious.

Paul looked pensive. “Not me.”

Rudy was surprised. “Really?” he said. “You wouldn’t go on a flight to the other side of the galaxy?”

“Are you serious? That’s the problem with the Locarno. It puts all this stuff within range. But what’s really going to be there that we haven’t already seen? If we’ve learned anything at all these last few decades, it’s that the galaxy looks pretty much the same everywhere. Dust clouds, empty worlds, a few ruins. The stars are all the same. What’s the big deal?”

Rudy took a moment to chew down a piece of pizza. “It’s someplace we’ve never been before, Paul. The other side of the forest.”

AT A QUARTER to seven they trooped back down to the control center. Jon was escorted by reporters, who never seemed to tire of asking the same questions. Margo Dee took him aside to wish him luck. “Let’s hope,” she said, “this is a day we’ll always remember.”

By seven the room had settled down, they were up live on the networks, and Jon was back at the panel. The clock activated with three minutes to go. When the signal arrived, it would come in the form of a voice message, the words Greetings from Pluto. Jon had argued for a simple series of beeps, especially with the world watching. “It has a little more class.” But Rudy was part showman, had to be, or the Foundation would never have survived. So Greetings from Pluto it became. They were using the voice of a well-known character actor, Victor Caldwell. Caldwell, a major force in promoting the Foundation, had died the year before. But his baritone was known around the world.

Hutch stood in a corner calmly drinking coffee. She could be a cold number when she wanted to.

The room went dead silent as the last seconds drained off. Rudy told himself to relax. The counter hit zero, and everybody strained forward. He could hear himself breathing.

Somebody coughed.

Somewhere a door closed. Distant voices.

Jon pushed back in his chair.

Plus one minute.

Rudy shoved his fists into his pockets. Come on, Victor. Where are you?

Reporters began to look at one another. Jani Kloefmann leaned in his direction. “When do we reach a point where it becomes a problem?” she asked, keeping her voice low.

“Don’t know, Jani,” he said. “We’re in unknown territory here.”

Two minutes.

WHEN SIX MINUTES had passed, Jon stood up and faced the cameras. His face told it all. “No way it could have taken this long,” he said. “Something’s wrong.”

It was as if the air went out of the room. Everything deflated. There was another barrage of questions, a few laughs, and lots of people talking on commlinks.

Rudy took time to commiserate with Jon, who managed to maintain a brave demeanor. “I don’t understand it,” he said. “The numbers were right. It should have worked. It had to work.”

They waited a half hour. People came over to shake their hands, tell them they were sorry. Then the crowd drifted away. Rudy decided he’d waited long enough. He corralled Jon and Hutch, was unable to find Paul, and went up to the main concourse. While they walked, Jon speculated that maybe there’d been a problem with the Happy Times. “Maybe the main engines were defective,” he said. “Maybe they screwed up the wiring. That’s all it would have taken. With no AI on board, nobody would have known.”

They ended in the Orbital Bar & Grill, where they could watch the sun rise. It was soaring into the sky as the station rushed toward the horizon. Not like on the ground, where movement wasn’t quite visible.

Jon couldn’t stop talking about where things might have gone wrong. He mentioned several possibilities, other than the ship. “There are areas,” he confessed, “where the theory becomes elastic. Where the parameters are not entirely clear. Where you have to test. Find out.” They needed to learn from this, he continued. Make some corrections. He thought all it might take would be an adjustment in fueling correspondences.