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board and the equations elucidated there, then looked back to Jela.
    “Given the fact that Vinylhaven is gone,” he murmured, “let’s calculate the transport-can big enough to hold the missing volume and mass. . . .”
    The lesson was not lost on Jela. They did the math, several times.
    “Your answer as to the power source?” the elder instructor asked Jela.
    He sighed and pushed back from his pad, though his fingers still wandered lightly over the keys, looking for a solution that made sense, granting the data . . .
    “Loss-less total conversion?” he offered.
    “Consider the multiple spin-states, and the mass of the photons . . .” The younger, that was.
    Jela sighed again. “Are you sure there’s not a black hole? I mean. . . .”
    “Absolutely no sign of one,” the elder answered, “and insufficient to have cleared the zone. Loss-less total conversion fails, as far as we’re able to compute, if the mass actually moves somewhere else. We’re talking energy levels above those in a super-sized galactic core black hole. With no trace.”
    “The nova you mentioned?”
    “Likely not coincidence,” the elder conceded, “but not nearly enough power to cause this. Perhaps there was leakage and we simply don’t know what to look for.”
    “Not natural,” Jela persisted. “You’re sure ? Not some rare, once-in-a-billion-year event?”
    The two instructors looked at each other and a message passed between them as surely as if they’d used finger-talk.
    The younger reached into a pocket, and withdrew a datastrip.
    “Vinylhaven is the seventh such event that we’re sure of. We have been apprized of three more since. All in the Arm. This datastrip contains a summation of the ten events and what we can deduce about the physics, the geology, and the cosmology.”
    He laid the strip across Jela’s palm. “Tomorrow, we’ll want to see if you’ve found a pattern.”
    The elder instructor placed a second strip in Jela’s hand.
    “Background on the commanders and garrisons, native populations. The people . . .”
    Dread nibbled at the edge of Jela’s consciousness again, dread and sadness.
    “Do you expect me to solve this?” he asked.
    They looked away, almost as one. The elder looked back with a sigh.
    “No. Not solve it. But we want your help. We’re looking for special circumstances. For insight. For hope. And you must know, Captain M, that your mission, when you leave here, will be in part to keep the troops in place and fighting, whether there is hope or none. It’s about all we can do right now.”
    HOWEVER, the next day did not bring the mathematical pair back, nor the next several beyond that. Rather, Jela was immersed in an intense round of training on surviving small-arms shoot-outs, of choosing the right weapon, of avoiding detection, as well as refreshers on ships, on engines and power plants, on intra-system navigation, and more history of the First Phase.
    So, he kept to the project in his so-called “off-time,” eating over study flimsies, exercising with computer screens and keyboards within reach, captured by the problem and hungry to se where the data led him.
    He tried to understand the locations of the disappearances, drawing simple maps of the missing sections, and more maps, over time. He’d tried analysis by local population or lack of it, since only four of the now-missing locations had any population to speak of. He analyzed by political leanings of nearby garrison commanders, by system discovery or occupation date, by the colors of the stars, even by the alphabetical orders of the names of the stars or systems or planets.
    The databases he had been given were large and flexible; but he strained them, joined them together and drilled through them. He pondered and set the computer to pondering . . .
    In the meantime: exercise, classes, exercise, reading, exercise, classes, exercise, research, sleep.
    Sleep proved its own mystery for there was no doubt that he’d found a