Anyone who has ever traveled on a Guild heighliner has experienced a profound disturbance upon being told that while in transit the traveler ami the ship he rides are, literally, nowhere at all. The intense feeling of being "lost" is sometimes too much for unstable individuals to bear, and repeated exposure to the Void can lead to serious personality imbalances. The secret of controlling the field was difficult to learn because, during its early development, the investigators did not have any theoretical understanding of the suspensor-nullification effect. It was almost a century before researchers came to realize that as soon as the field was disturbed, the space-time pocket was formed and translated to some other location. The investigators at first thought that they had merely discovered a very expensive way to send unwanted matter to nowhere. Today, under Guild management, the control of the suspensor-nullificaJion field is a highly specialized art: before spice-heightened navigators, space travel was perforce directed by computers. The most mundane use of the suspcnsor-nullification field was discovered only after Holtzman published his unified theories. There is, it turns out, a certain critical size for the three-dimensional Holtzman Effect field: if the field is smaller than this size and it is itself enclosed within a globular planar effect field, a second-order of the inner surface of a planar field is manifested. This effect, known as Holtzman Repulsion, is much more powerful and long-ranged than the mass-repulsion effect of the inner side of a planar effect: the effect is strong enough that it can be used to "levitate" masses on planetary surfaces. Suspensor platforms are used occa- sionally for personal transport, but they are quite expensive, and are normally used only by the very rich, or in circumstances where normal magnetic levitation cannot be made to serve. W.D.I. HOUSES MAJOR, see GREAT HOUSES. HOUSES MINOR. The popular name for the planetary gentry, those landowners, politicians, entrepreneurs, and performers who were confined by economic circumstance to one planet or planetary system. The Houses Minor were far more numerous (some estimates have reached as high as one million; other commentators limited the number of Houses Minor to about 100,000, using economic and political factors to decrease the possibilities) and far more diverse than the Houses Major; they cannot be described except in the broadest of terms. In general, however, they consisted of those persons or families who had reached an economic status of relative luxury compared to those around them, or who had entrenched themselves as a persistent political power in the lives of the citizens of at least a planetary continent, but who had not yet transcended planetary status. Many of the Houses Minor were employed by the Houses Major; none of the Houses Major served others except in transitory political alliances.