“I have an idea,” said Ishikawsa. “Maybe we should talk about it.”

“What is it?” Shwartz said warily.

“We could open a wormhole that leads to someplace other than the middle of Jupiter.”

“But we’re already in a wormhole.”

“So?”

“Nobody’s ever opened a wormhole inside a wormhole. You might wreck the ship, or even destroy the entire universe.” He looked out the windscreen at the deadly vortex in which they were caught. “But you could try it.”

Pitcher had been looking from one to the other. He went to the airlock and put on a spacesuit. The little cabin filled with the generator’s rising howl as Ishikawa powered up the warp manifold.

“What’s our destination?” Shwartz wondered.

“I can’t say. I still haven’t figured out how to calculate a chord. But, no place can be worse than where we’re headed, right?”

Pitcher let himself out of the ship. Thoughtfully he walked across the hull to the Finite State Machine’s grappling magnet and kicked it off.