The _Ancient Mariner_ was built in the big Transcontinental shops in
Newark; the power they needed was not available in the smaller shops.
Working twenty-four hours a day, in three shifts, skilled men took two
months to finish the hull according to Fuller's specifications. The huge
walls of lux metal required great care in construction, for they could
not be welded; they had to be formed in position. And they could only be
polished under powerful magnets, where the dense magnetic field softened
the lux metal enough to allow a diamond polisher to do the job.
When the hull was finished, there came the laborious work of installing
the power plant and the tremendous power leads, the connectors, the
circuits to the relays--a thousand complex circuits.
Much of it was standard: the molecular power tubes, the molecular ray
projectors, the power tubes for the invisibility apparatus, and many
other parts. All the relays were standard, the gyroscopic stabilizers
were standard, and the electromagnetic braking equipment for the gyros
was standard.
But there would be long days of work ahead for Arcot, Wade, and Morey,
for only they could install the special equipment; only they could put
in the complicated wiring, for no one else on Earth understood the
circuits they had to establish.
During the weeks of waiting, Arcot and his friends worked on auxiliary
devices to be used with the ship. They wanted to make some improvements
on the old molecular ray pistols, and to develop atomic powered heat
projectors for hand use. The primary power they stored in small
space-strain coils in the handgrip of the pistol. Despite their small
size, the coils were capable of storing power for thirty hours of
continuous operation of the rays. The finished weapon was scarcely
larger than a standard molecular ray pistol.
Arcot pointed out that many of the planets they might visit would be
larger than Earth, and they lacked any way of getting about readily
under high gravity. Since something had to be done about that, Arcot did
it. He demonstrated it to his friends one day in the shop yard.
Morey and Wade had just been in to see Fuller about some details of the
ship, and as they came out, Arcot called them over to his work bench. He
was wearing a space suit without the helmet.
The modern space suit is made of woven lux metal wires of extremely
small diameter and airproofed with a rubberoid fluorocarbon plastic, and
furnished with air and heating units. Made as it was, it offered
protection nothing else could offer; it was almost a perfect insulator
and was resistant to the attack of any chemical reagent. Not even
elemental fluorine could corrode it. And the extreme strength of the lux
metal fiber made it stronger, pound for pound, than steel or coronium.
On Arcot's back was a pack of relux plated metal. It was connected by
relux web belts to a broad belt that circled Arcot's waist. One thin
cable ran down the right arm to a small relux tube about eight inches
long by two inches in diameter.
"Watch!" Arcot said, grinning.
He reached to his belt and flipped a little switch.
"So long! See you later!" He pointed his right arm toward the ceiling
and sailed lightly into the air. He lowered the angle of his arm and
moved smoothly across the huge hangar, floating toward the shining bulk
of the rapidly forming _Ancient Mariner_. He circled the room, rising
and sinking at will, then headed for the open door.
"Come out and watch me where there's more room," he called.
Out in the open, he darted high up into the air until he was a mere
speck in the sky. Then he suddenly came dropping down and landed lightly
before them, swaying on his feet and poised lightly on his toes.
"Some jump," said Morey, in mock surprise.
"Yeah," agreed Fuller. "Try again."
"Or," Wade put in, "give me that weight annihilator and I'll beat you at
your own game. What's the secret?"
"That's a cute gadget. How much load does it carry?" asked Morey, more
practically.
"I can develop about ten tons as far as it goes, but the human body
can't take more than five gravities, so we can only visit planets with
less than that surface gravity. The principle is easy to see; I'll show
you."
He unhooked the cables and took the power pack from his back. "The main
thing is the molecular power unit here, electrically heated and mounted
on a small, massive gyroscope. That gyro is necessary, too. I tried
leaving it out and almost took a nosedive. I had it coupled directly to
the body and leaned forward a little bit when I was in the air. Without
a gyro to keep the drive upright, I took a loop and started heading for
the ground. I had to do some fancy gymnastics to keep from ending up six
feet under--literally.
"The power is all generated in the pack with a small power plate and
several storage coils. I've also got it hooked to these holsters at my
belt so we can charge the pistols while we carry them.
"The control is this secondary power cable running down my arm to my
hand. That gives you your direction, and the rheostat here at the belt
changes the velocity.
"I've only made this one so far, but I've ordered six others like it. I
thought you guys might like one, too."
"I think you guessed right!" said Morey, looking inside the power case.
"Hey! Why all the extra room in the case?"
"It's an unperfected invention as yet; we might want to put some more
stuff in there for our own private use."
Each of the men tried out the apparatus and found it quite satisfactory.
Meanwhile, there was other work to be done.
Wade had been given the job of gathering the necessary food and anything
else in the way of supplies that he might think of. Arcot was collecting
the necessary spare parts and apparatus. Morey was gathering a small
library and equipping a chemistry laboratory. Fuller was to get together
the necessary standard equipment for the ship--tables, seats, bunks, and
other furniture.
It took months of work, and it seemed it would never be finished, but
finally, one clear, warm day in August, the ship was completely equipped
and ready to go.
On the last inspection, the elder Dr. Arcot and the elder Mr. Morey went
with the four younger men. They stood beside the great intergalactic
cruiser, looking up at its shining hull.
"We came a bit later than we expected, son," said Dr. Arcot, "but we
still expect a good show." He paused and frowned, "I understand you
don't intend to take any trial trip. What's the idea?"
Arcot had been afraid his father would be worried about that, so he
framed his explanation carefully. "Dad, we figured this ship out to the
last decimal place; it's the best we can make it. Remember, the
molecular motion drive will get a trial first; we'll give it a trial
trip when we leave the sun. If there's any trouble, naturally, we'll
return. But the equipment is standard, so we're expecting no trouble.
"The only part that would require a trial trip is the space-control
apparatus, and there's no way to give that a trial trip. Remember, we
have to get far enough out from the sun so that the gravitational field
will be weak enough for the drive to overcome it. If we tried it this
close, we'd just be trying to neutralize the sun's gravity. We'd be
pouring out energy, wasting a great deal of it; but out away from the
sun, we'll get most of the energy back.
"On the other hand, when we do get out and get started we will go faster
than light, and we'd be hopelessly beyond the range of the molecular
motion drive in an instant. In other words, if the space-control drive
doesn't work, we can't come back, and if it does work, there's no need
to come back.
"And if anything goes wrong, we're the only ones who could fix it,
anyway. If anything goes wrong, I'll radio Earth. You ought to be able
to hear from me in about a dozen years." He smiled suddenly. "Say! We
might go out and get back here in time to hear ourselves talking!
"But you can see why we felt that there was little reason for a trial
trip. If it's a failure, we'll never be back to say so; if it isn't,
we'll be able to continue."
His father still looked worried, but he nodded in acquiescence. "Perfect
logic, son, but I guess we may as well give up the discussion.
Personally, I don't like it. Let's see this ship of yours."
The great hull was two hundred feet long and thirty feet in diameter.
The outer wall, one foot of solid lux metal, was separated from the
inner, one-inch relux wall by a two inch gap which would be evacuated in
space. The two walls were joined in many places by small lux metal
cross-braces. The windows consisted of spaces in the relux wall,
allowing the occupants to see through the transparent lux hull.
From the outside, it was difficult to detect the exact outline of the
ship, for the clear lux metal was practically invisible and the foot of
it that surrounded the more visible part of the ship gave a curious
optical illusion. The perfect reflecting ability of the relux made the
inner hull difficult to see, too. It was more by absence than presence
that one detected it; it blotted out things behind it.
The great window of the pilot room disclosed the pilot seats and the
great switchboard to one side. Each of the windows was equipped with a
relux shield that slid into position at the touch of a switch, and these
were already in place over the observatory window, so only the long,
narrow portholes showed the lighted interior.
For some minutes, the elder men stood looking at the graceful beauty of
the ship.
"Come on in--see the inside," suggested Fuller.
They entered through the airlock close to the base of the ship. The
heavy lux door was opened by automatic machinery from the inside, but
the combination depended on the use of a molecular ray and the knowledge
of the correct place, which made it impossible for anyone to open it
unless they had the ray and knew where to use it.
From the airlock, they went directly to the power room. Here they heard
the soft purring of a large oscillator tube and the indistinguishable
murmur of smoothly running AC generators powered by large contraterrene
reactors.
The elder Dr. Arcot glanced in surprise at the heavy-duty ammeter in a
control panel.
"Half a billion amperes! Good Lord! Where is all that power going?" He
looked at his son.
"Into the storage coils. It's going in at ten kilovolts, so that's a
five billion kilowatt supply. It's been going for half an hour and has
half an hour to run. It takes two tons of matter to charge the coil to
capacity, and we're carrying twenty tons of fuel--enough for ten
charges. We shouldn't need more than three tons if all goes well, but
'all' seldom does.
"See that large black cylinder up there?" Arcot asked, pointing.
Above them, lying along the roof of the power room, lay a great black
cylinder nearly two feet in diameter and extending out through the wall
in the rear. It was made integral with two giant lux metal beams that
reached to the bow of the ship in a long, sweeping curve. From one of
the power switchboards, two heavy cables ran up to the giant cylinder.
"That's the main horizontal power unit. We can develop an acceleration
of ten gravities either forward or backward. In the curve of the ship,
on top, sides, and bottom, there are power units for motion in the other
two directions.
"Most of the rest of the stuff in this section is old hat to you,
though. Come on into the next room."
Arcot opened the heavy relux door, leading the way into the next room,
which was twice the size of the power room. The center of the floor was
occupied by a heavy pedestal of lux metal upon which was a huge,
relux-encased, double torus storage coil. There was a large switchboard
at the opposite end, while around the room, in ordered groups, stood the
familiar double coils, each five feet in diameter. The space within them
was already darkening.
"Well," said Arcot, senior, "that's some battery of power coils,
considering the amount of energy one can store. But what's the big one
for?"
"That's the main space control," the younger Arcot answered. "While our
power is stored in the smaller ones, we can shoot it into this one,
which, you will notice, is constructed slightly differently. Instead of
holding the field within it, completely enclosed, the big one will
affect all the space about it. We will then be enclosed in what might be
called a hyperspace of our own making."
"I see," said his father. "You go into hyperspace and move at any speed
you please. But how will you see where you're going?"
"We won't, as far as I know. I don't expect to see a thing while we're
in that hyperspace. We'll simply aim the ship in the direction we want
to go and then go into hyperspace. The only thing we have to avoid is
stars; their gravitational fields would drain the energy out of the
apparatus and we'd end up in the center of a white-hot star. Meteors and
such, we don't have to worry about; their fields aren't strong enough to
drain the coils, and since we won't be in normal space, we can't hit
them."
The elder Morey looked worried. "If you can't see your way back you'll
get lost! And you can't radio back for help."
"Worse than that!" said Arcot. "We couldn't receive a signal of any kind
after we get more than three hundred light years away; there weren't any
radios before that.
"What we'll do is locate ourselves through the sun's light. We'll take
photographs every so often and orient ourselves by them when we come
back."
"That sounds like an excellent method of stellar navigation," agreed
Morey senior. "Let's see the rest of the ship." He turned and walked
toward the farther door.
The next room was the laboratory. On one side of the room was a complete
physics lab and on the other was a well-stocked and well-equipped
chemistry lab. They could perform many experiments here that no man had
been able to perform due to lack of power. In this ship they had more
generating facilities than all the power stations of Earth combined!
Arcot opened the next door. "This next room is the physics and chemistry
storeroom. Here we have a duplicate--in some cases, six or seven
duplicates--of every piece of apparatus on board, and plenty of material
to make more. Actually, we have enough equipment to make a new ship out
of what we have here. It would be a good deal smaller, but it would
work.
"The greater part of our materials is stored in the curvature of the
ship, where it will be easy to get at if necessary. All our water and
food is there, and the emergency oxygen tanks.
"Now let's take the stairway to the upper deck."
The upper deck was the main living quarters. There were several small
rooms on each side of the corridor down the center; at the extreme nose
was the control room, and at the extreme stern was the observatory. The
observatory was equipped with a small but exceedingly powerful
telectroscope, developed from those the Nigrans had left on one of the
deserted planets Sol had captured in return for the loss of Pluto to the
Black Star. The arc commanded by the instrument was not great, but it
was easy to turn the ship about, and most of their observations could be
made without trouble.
Each of the men had a room of his own; there was a small galley and a
library equipped with all the books the four men could think of as being
useful. The books and all other equipment were clamped in place to keep
them from flying around loose when the ship accelerated.
The control room at the nose was surrounded by a hemisphere of
transparent lux metal which enabled them to see in every direction
except directly behind, and even that blind spot could be covered by
stationing a man in the observatory.
There were heat projectors and molecular ray projectors, each operated
from the control room in the nose. To complete the armament, there were
more projectors in the stern, controlled from the observatory, and a
set on either side controlled from the library and the galley.
The ship was provisioned for two years--two years without stops. With
the possibility of stopping on other planets, the four men could exist
indefinitely in the ship.
After the two older men had been shown all through the intergalactic
vessel, the elder Arcot turned to his old friend. "Morey, it looks as if
it was time for us to leave the _Ancient Mariner_ to her pilots!"
"I guess you're right. Well--I'll just say goodbye--but you all know
there's a lot more I could say." Morey senior looked at them and started
toward the airlock.
"Goodbye, son," said the elder Arcot. "Goodbye, men. I'll be expecting
you any time within two years. We can have no warning, I suppose; your
ship will outrace the radio beam. Goodbye." Dr. Arcot joined his old
friend and they went outside.
The heavy lux metal door slid into place behind them, and the thick
plastic cushions sealed the entrance to the airlock.
The workmen and the other personnel around the ship cleared the area and
stood well back from the great hull. The two older men waved to the men
inside the ship.
Suddenly the ship trembled, and rose toward the sky.
V
Arcot, at the controls of the _Ancient Mariner_, increased the
acceleration as the ship speared up toward interplanetary space. Soon,
the deep blue of the sky had given way to an intense violet, and this
faded to the utter black of space as the ship drew away from the planet
that was its home.
"That lump of dust there is going to look mighty little when we get
back," said Wade softly.
"But," Arcot reminded him, "that little lump of dust is going to pull us
across a distance that our imaginations can't conceive of. And we'll be
darned happy to see that pale globe swinging in space when we get
back--provided, of course, that we do get back."
The ship was straining forward now under the pull of its molecular
motion power units, accelerating at a steady rate, rapidly increasing
the distance between the ship and Earth.
The cosmic ray power generators were still charging the coils,
preventing the use of the space strain drive. Indeed, it would be a good
many hours before they would be far enough from the sun to throw the
ship into hyperspace.
In the meantime, Morey was methodically checking every control as Arcot
called out the readings on the control panel. Everything was working to
perfection. Their every calculation had checked out in practice so far.
But the real test was yet to come.
They were well beyond the orbit of Pluto when they decided they would be
safe in using the space strain drive and throwing the ship into
hyperspace.
Morey was in the hyperspace control room, watching the instruments
there. They were ready!
"Hold on!" called Arcot. "Here we go--if at all!" He reached out to the
control panel before him and touched the green switch that controlled
the molecular motion machines. The big power tubes cut off, and their
acceleration ceased. His fingers pushed a brilliant red switch--there
was a dull, muffled thud as a huge relay snapped shut.
Suddenly, a strange tingling feeling of power ran through them--space
around them was suddenly black. The lights dimmed for an instant as the
titanic current that flowed through the gigantic conductors set up a
terrific magnetic field, reacting with the absorption plates. The power
seemed to climb rapidly to a maximum--then, quite suddenly, it was
gone.
The ship was quiet. No one spoke. The meters, which had flashed over to
their limits, had dropped back to zero once more, except those which
indicated the power stored in the giant coil. The stars that had shone
brilliantly around them in a myriad of colors were gone. The space
around them glowed strangely, and there was a vast cloud of strange,
violet or pale green stars before them. Directly ahead was one green
star that glowed big and brilliant, then it faded rapidly and shrank to
a tiny dot--a distant star. There was a strange tenseness about the men;
they seemed held in an odd, compelled silence.
Arcot reached forward again. "Cutting off power, Morey!" The red tumbler
snapped back. Again space seemed to be charged with a vast surplus of
energy that rushed in from all around, coursing through their bodies,
producing a tingling feeling. Then space rocked in a gray cloud about
them; the stars leaped out at them in blazing glory again.
"Well, it worked once!" breathed Arcot with a sigh of relief. "Lord, I
made some errors in calculation, though! I hope I didn't make any more!
Morey--how was it? I only used one-sixteenth power."
"Well, don't use any more, then," said Morey. "We sure traveled! The
things worked perfectly. By the way, it's a good thing we had all the
relays magnetically shielded; the magnetic field down here was so strong
that my pocket kit tried to start running circles around it.
"According to your magnetic drag meter, the conductors were carrying
over fifty billion amperes. The small coils worked perfectly. They're
charged again; the power went back into them from the big coil with only
a five percent loss of power--about twenty thousand megawatts."
"Hey, Arcot," Wade said. "I thought you said we wouldn't be able to see
the stars."
Arcot spread his hands. "I did say that, and all my apologies for it.
But we're not seeing them by light. The stars all have
projections--shadows--in this space because of their intense
gravitational fields. There are probably slight fluctuations in the
field, perhaps one every minute or so. Since we were approaching them at
twenty thousand times the speed of light, the Doppler effect gives us
what looks like violet light.
"We saw the stars in front of us as violet points. The green ones were
actually behind us, and the green light was tremendously reduced in
frequency. It certainly can't be anything less than gamma rays and
probably even of greater frequency.
"Did you notice there were no stars off to the side? We weren't
approaching them, so they didn't give either effect."
"How did you know which was which?" asked Fuller skeptically.
"Did you see that green star directly ahead of us?" Arcot asked. "The
one that dwindled so rapidly? That could only have been the sun, since
the sun was the only star close enough to show up as a disc. Since it
was green and I knew it was behind us, I decided that all the green ones
were behind us. It isn't proof, but it's a good indication."
"You win, as usual," admitted Fuller.
"Well, where are we?" asked Wade. "I think that's more important."
"I haven't the least idea," confessed Arcot. "Let's see if we can find
out. I've got the robot pilot on, so we can leave the ship to itself.
Let's take a look at Old Sol from a distance that no man ever reached
before!"
They started for the observatory. Morey joined them and Arcot put the
view of Sol and his family on the telectroscope screen. He increased the
magnification to maximum, and the four men looked eagerly at the system.
The sun glowed brilliantly, and the planets showed plainly.
"Now, if we wanted to take the trouble, we could calculate when the
planets were in that position and determine the distance we have come.
However, I notice that Pluto is still in place, so that means we are
seeing the Solar System as it was before the passing of the Black Star.
We're at least two light years away."
"More than that," said Morey. He pointed at the screen. "See here, how
Mars is placed in relation to Venus and Earth? The planets were in that
configuration seven years ago. We're seven light years from Earth."
"Good enough!" Arcot grinned. "That means we're within two light years
of Sirius, since we were headed in that direction. Let's turn the ship
so we can take a look at it with the telectroscope."
Since the power had been cut off, the ship was in free fall, and the men
were weightless. Arcot didn't try to walk toward the control room; he
simply pushed against the wall with his feet and made a long, slow dive
for his destination.
The others reached for the handgrips in the walls while Arcot swung the
ship gently around so that its stern was pointed toward Sirius. Because
of its brilliance and relative proximity to Sol, Sirius is the brightest
star in the heavens, as seen from Earth. At this much lesser distance,
it shone as a brilliant point of light that blazed wonderfully. They
turned the telectroscope toward it, but there was little they could see
that was not visible from the big observatory on the Moon.
"I think we may as well go nearer," suggested Morey, "and see what we
find on close range observation. Meanwhile, turn the ship back around
and I'll take some pictures of the sun and its surrounding star field
from this distance. Our only way of getting back is going to be this
series of pictures, so I think we had best make it complete. For the
first light century, we ought to take a picture every ten light years,
and after that one each light century until we reach a point where we
are only getting diminishing pictures of the local star cluster. After
that, we can wait until we reach the edge of the Galaxy."
"Sounds all right to me," agreed Arcot. "After all, you're the
astronomer, I'm not. To tell you the truth, I'd have to search a while
to find Old Sol again. I can't see just where he is. Of course, I could
locate him by means of the gyroscope settings, but I'm afraid I wouldn't
find him so easily visually."
"Say! You sure are a fine one to pilot an expedition in space!" cried
Wade in mock horror. "I think we ought to demote him for that! Imagine!
He plans a trip of a thousand million light years, and then gets us out
seven light years and says he doesn't know where he is! Doesn't even
know where home is! I'm glad we have a cautious man like Morey along."
He shook his head sadly.
They took a series of six plates of the sun, using different
magnifications.
"These plates will help prove our story, too," said Morey as he looked
at the finished plates. "We might have gone only a little way into
space, up from the plane of the ecliptic and taken plates through a wide
angle camera. But we'd have had to go at least seven years into the past
to get a picture like this."
The new self-developing short-exposure plates, while not in perfect
color balance, were more desirable for this work, since they took less
time on exposure.
Morey and the others joined Arcot in the control room and strapped
themselves into the cushioned seats. Since the space strain mechanism
had proved itself in the first test, they felt they needed no more
observations than they could make from the control room meters.
Arcot gazed out at the spot that was their immediate goal and said
slowly: "How much bigger than Sol is that star, Morey?"
"It all depends on how you measure size," Morey replied. "It is two and
a half times as heavy, has four times the volume, and radiates
twenty-five times as much light. In other words, one hundred million
tons of matter disappear each second in that star.
"That's for Sirius A, of course. Sirius B, its companion, is a different
matter; it's a white dwarf. It has only one
one-hundred-twenty-five-thousandths the volume of Sirius A, but it
weighs _one third_ as much. It radiates more per square inch than our
sun, but, due to its tiny size, it is very faint. That star, though
almost as massive as the sun, is only about the size of Earth."
"You sure have those statistics down pat!" said Fuller, laughing. "But
I must say they're interesting. What's that star made of, anyway? Solid
lux metal?"
"Hardly!" Morey replied. "Lux metal has a density of around 103, while
this star has a density so high that one cubic inch of its matter would
weigh a ton on Earth."
"Wow!" Wade ejaculated. "I'd hate to drop a baseball on my toe on that
star!"
"It wouldn't hurt you," Arcot said, smiling. "If you could lift the
darned thing, you ought to be tough enough to stand dropping it on your
toe. Remember, it would weigh about two hundred tons! Think you could
handle it?"
"At any rate, here we go. When we get there, you can get out and try
it."
Again came the shock of the start. The heavens seemed to reel about
them; the bright spot of Sirius was a brilliant violet point that
swelled like an expanding balloon, spreading out until it filled a large
angle.
Then again the heavens reeled, and they were still. The control room was
filled with a dazzling splendor of brilliant blue-white light, and an
intense heat beat in upon them.
"Brother! Feel that heat," said Arcot in awe. "We'd better watch
ourselves; that thing is giving off plenty of ultraviolet. We could end
up with third-degree sunburns if we're not careful." Suddenly he stopped
and looked around in surprise. "Hey! Morey! I thought you said this was
a double star! Look over there! That's no white dwarf--_it's a planet_!"
"Ridiculous!" snapped Morey. "It's impossible for a planet to be in
equilibrium about a double star! But--" He paused, bewildered. "But it
is a planet! But--but it can't be! We've made too many measurements on
this star to make it possible!"
"I don't give a hang whether it can or not," Wade said coolly, "the fact
remains that it is. Looks as if that shoots a whole flock of holes in
that bedtime story you were telling us about a superdense star."
"I make a motion we look more closely first," said Fuller, quite
logically.
But at first the telectroscope only served to confuse them more. It was
most certainly a planet, and they had a strange, vague feeling of having
seen it before.
Arcot mentioned this, and Wade launched into a long, pedantic discussion
of how the left and right hemispheres of the brain get out of step at
times, causing a sensation of having seen a thing before when it was
impossible to have seen it previously.
Arcot gave Wade a long, withering stare and then pushed himself into the
library without saying a word. A moment later, he was back with a large
volume entitled: "_The Astronomy of the Nigran Invasion_," by _D. K.
Harkness_. He opened the volume to a full-page photograph of the third
planet of the Black Star as taken from a space cruiser circling the
planet. Silently, he pointed to it and to the image swimming on the
screen of the telectroscope.
"Good Lord!" said Wade in astonished surprise. "It's impossible! We came
here faster than light, and that planet got here first!"
"As you so brilliantly remarked a moment ago," Arcot pointed out, "I
don't give a hang whether it can or not--it is. How they did it, I don't
know, but it does clear up a number of things. According to the records
we found, the ancient Nigrans had a force ray that could move planets
from their orbits. I wonder if it couldn't be used to break up a double
star? Also, we know their scientists were looking for a method of moving
faster than light; if we can do it, so could they. They just moved their
whole system of planets over here after getting rid of the upsetting
influence of the white dwarf."
"Perfect!" exclaimed Morey enthusiastically. "It explains everything."
"Except that we saw that companion star when we stopped back there, half
an hour ago," said Fuller.
"Not half an hour ago," Arcot contradicted. "Two years ago. We saw the
light that left the companion before it was moved. It's rather like
traveling in time."
"If that's so," asked Fuller, suddenly worried, "what is our time in
relation to Earth?"
"If we moved by the space-strain drive at all times," Arcot explained,
"we would return at exactly the same time we left. Time is passing
normally on Earth as it is with us right now, but whenever we use the
space-strain, we move instantaneously from one point to another as far
as Earth and the rest of the universe is concerned. It seems to take
time to us because we are within the influence of the field.
"Suppose we were to take a trip that required a week. In other words,
three days traveling in space-strain, a day to look at the destination,
and three more days coming back. When we returned to Earth, they would
insist we had only been gone one day, the time we spent out of the
drive. See?"
"I catch," said Fuller. "By the way, shouldn't we take some photographs
of this system? Otherwise, Earth won't get the news for several years
yet."
"Right," agreed Morey. "And we might as well look for the other planets
of the Black Star, too."
They made several plates, continuing their observations until all the
planets had been located, even old Pluto, where crews of Nigran
technicians were obviously at work, building giant structures of lux
metal. The great cities of the Nigrans were beginning to bloom on the
once bleak plains of the planet. The mighty blaze of Sirius had warmed
Pluto, vaporizing its atmosphere and thawing its seas. The planet that
the Black Star had stolen from the Solar System was warmer than it had
been for two billion years.
"Well, that's it," said Arcot when they had finished taking the
necessary photographs. "We can prove we went faster than light easily,
now. The astronomers can take up the work of classifying the planets and
getting details of the orbits when we get back.
"Since the Nigrans now have a sun of their own, there should be no
reason for hostility between our race and theirs. Perhaps we can start
commercial trade with them. Imagine! Commerce over quintillions of miles
of space!"
"And," interrupted Wade, "they can make the trip to this system in less
time than it takes to get to Venus!"
"Meanwhile," said Morey, "let's get on with our own exploration."
They strapped themselves into the control seats once more and Arcot
threw in the molecular drive to take them away from the sun toward which
they had been falling.
When the great, hot disc of Sirius had once more diminished to a tiny
white pinhead of light, Arcot turned the ship until old Sol once more
showed plainly on the cross-hairs of the aiming telescope in the rear
of the vessel.
"Hold on," Arcot cautioned, "here we go again!"
Again he threw the little red tumbler that threw a flood of energy into
the coils. The space about them seemed to shiver and grow dim.
Arcot had thrown more power into the coils this time, so the stars ahead
of them instead of appearing violet were almost invisible; they were
radiating in the ultra-violet now. And the stars behind them, instead of
appearing to be green, had subsided to a dull red glow.
Arcot watched the dull red spark of Sirius become increasingly dimmer.
Then, quite suddenly, a pale violet disc in front of them ballooned out
of nowhere and slid off to one side.
The spaceship reeled, perking the men around in the control seats. Heavy
safety relays thudded dully; the instruments flickered under a suddenly
rising surge of power--then they were calm again. Arcot had snapped over
the power switch.
"That," he said quietly, "is not so good."
"Threw the gyroscopes, didn't it?" asked Morey, his voice equally as
quiet.
"It did--and I have no idea how far. We're off course and we don't know
which direction we're headed."