Page 882 - Enders_Game_Full_Book

"And if it turns out Jane can get him Outside but can't hold things together there, then he'll be stranded in a place that doesn't even have any placeness to it," said Valentine.
"Well, yes," said Grego. "If it works halfway, the passengers are effectively dead. But since we'll be in a place without time, it won't matter to us. It'll just be an eternal instant. Probably not enough time for our brains to notice that the experiment failed. Stasis."
"Of course, if it works," said Olhado, "then we'll carry our own spacetime with us, so there would be duration. Therefore, we'll never know if we fail. We'll only notice if we succeed."
"But I'll know if he never comes back," said Valentine.
"Right," said Grego. "If he never comes back, then you'll have a few months of knowing it until the fleet gets here and blasts everything and everybody all to hell."
"Or until the descolada turns everybody's genes inside out and kills us all," added Olhado.
"I suppose you're right," said Valentine. "Failure won't kill them any deader than they'll be if they stay."
"But you see the deadline pressure that we're under," said Grego. "We don't have much time left before Jane loses her ansible connections. Andrew says that she might well survive it after all-- but she'll be crippled. Brain-damaged."
"So even if it works, the first flight might be the last."
"No," said Olhado. "The flights are instantaneous. If it works, she can shuttle everybody off this planet in no more time than it takes people to get in and out of the starship."
"You mean it can take off from a planet surface?"
"That's still iffy," said Grego. "She might only be able to calculate location within, say ten thousand kilometers. There's no explosion or displacement problem, since the philotes will reenter Inside space ready to obey natural laws again. But if the starship reappears in the middle of a planet it'll still be pretty hard to dig to the surface."
"But if she can be really precise-- within a couple of centimeters, for instance-- then the flights can be surface-to-surface," said Olhado.
"Of course we're dreaming," said Grego. "Jane's going to come back and tell us that even if she could turn all the stellar mass in the galaxy into computer chips, she couldn't hold all the data she'd have to know in order to make a starship travel this way. But at the moment, it still sounds possible and I am feeling good!"