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A few billion pecūniae of research funding for an FTI — Faster Than Ice — technology. That was the ICA's (the International Cryonautics Administration) annual budget.
The idea was that The Ice should be just like any other ice in some respects: frozen waves of water. If one could separate the potential motion property from the static material, like a combination of freezing a photon and separating a neutron from its spin, then one might apply said vector to a ship. A rolling set of these would even sum up in a standard head to tail fashion against an equal energy scalar, though there were competing models wherein the one assumed a continuous always-negative-slope decreasing momentum tensor and the other used instantaneous scalars from one Planck time to the next.
There was also a hypothetical issue with antiskid: running the ship within an area already drained of its potential energy. They thought that they might be able to get around this using p-doping and a negative bias, but it was looking as if the equation of state's stiffness might be fractally sensitive to local conditions.
That key breakthrough was just around the corner, though.
It was always just around the corner.
Fifty years and they still hadn't gone back to the world-puddle that sat in a shallow-grooved circuit all around the world, skittering along continuously a quarter mile above The Ice just three thousand miles beyond the edge of the world.
Fifty years, and they'd never since ventured farther than forty miles out.
What the hell were they spending the money on — paperclip operations?
O ~~~ O