Nemesis by Isaac Asimov

not?
    The signal light flashed and he heard the buzz. It flickered—things on Earth tended to flicker, while on Rotor everything was constant with an almost aggressive efficiency. “Enter,” he said in a low voice, but it was loud enough to activate the de-locking mechanism.
    Garand Wyler entered (Fisher knew it would be he) and looked at the other with an amused expression. “Have you budged since I left, Crile?”
    “Here and there. I’ve eaten. Spent some time in the bathroom.”
    “Good. You’re alive, then, even if you don’t look it.” He was grinning broadly, his skin smooth and brown, his eyes dark, his teeth white, his hair thick and crisp. “Brooding about Rotor?”
    “I think of it now and then.”
    “I kept meaning to ask, but never got around to it. It was Snow White without the Seven Dwarfs, wasn’t it?”
    “Snow White,” said Fisher. “I never saw one black person there.”
    “In that case, good riddance to them. Did you know that they’re gone?”
    Fisher’s muscles tightened and he nearly got to his feet, but he resisted the impulse. He said, nodding, “They said they would be.”
    “They meant it. They drifted away. We watched as far as we could; eavesdropped their radiation. They pumped up speed with this hyper-assistance of theirs and, in a split second, while we could still make them out loud and clear, they were gone. Everything cut off.”
    “Did you pick them up when they got back into space?”
    “Several times. Each time weaker. They were traveling at the speed of light after they had really flexed their muscles, and after three blips, into hyperspace and back into space, they were too far to be picked up.”
    Fisher said bitterly, “Their choice. They kicked out the nays—like me.”
    “I’m sorry you weren’t there. You should have been. It was interesting to watch. You know there were some hard-liners who insisted to the very end that hyper-assistance was a fraud, that it was all faked up, for some reason.”
    “Rotor had the Far Probe. They couldn’t have it sent as far away as they did without hyper-assistance.”
    “Faked! That’s what the hard-liners said.”
    “It was genuine.”
    “Yes, now they know it was. All of them. When Rotor just vanished off the instruments, there was no other explanation. Every Settlement was watching. No mistake. It vanished on every set of instruments at the samesecond. The irritating thing is, we can’t tell where it’s going.”
    “Alpha Centauri, I suppose. Where else?”
    “The Office keeps thinking that it might not be Alpha Centauri and that you might know that.”
    Fisher looked annoyed. “I’ve been debriefed all the way to the Moon and back. I haven’t held back anything.”
    “Sure. We know that. It’s nothing you know about. They want me to talk to you, friend to friend, and see what you may know that you
don’t
know about. Something may turn up that you haven’t thought of. You were there four years, married, had a kid. You couldn’t have missed everything.”
    “How could I? If there were the slightest notion that I was after anything, I’d have been kicked off. Just being from Earth made me completely suspect. If I hadn’t married—given that kind of proof that I planned to stay Rotorian—I would have been kicked off anyway. And as it was, they kept me far away from anything critical or sensitive.”
    Fisher looked away. “And it worked. My wife was just an astronomer. I didn’t have my pick, you know. I couldn’t put an ad on holovision announcing that I was in the market for a young lady who was a hyperspatialist. If I had met one, I would have done my best to hook on to her even if she looked like a hyena, but I never met one in all my time there. The technology was so sensitive, I think they kept the key people in complete isolation. I think they must all have worn masks in the laboratories and used code names. Four years—and I never got a hint, never found out a thing. And I knew it would