Silently, the four men watched the two ships, waiting for any hostile
movement. There was a long, tense moment, then something happened for
which three of them were totally unprepared.
Arcot burst into sudden laughter.
"Don't--ho--hoh-ho--oh--don't shoot!" he cried, laughing so hard it was
almost impossible to understand him. "Ohoh--space--curved!" he managed
to gasp.
For a moment more, Morey looked puzzled--then he was laughing as hard as
Arcot. Helplessly, Wade and Fuller looked at them, then at each other.
Then, suddenly, Wade caught the meaning of Arcot's remark and joined the
other two in laughter.
"All right," said Fuller, still mystified, "when you half-witted
physicists recover, please let me in on the joke!" He knew it had
something to do with the mysterious ships, so he looked closely at them
in hopes that he would get the point, too. When he saw it, he blinked in
amazement. "Hey! What is this? Those ships are exact duplicates of the
_Ancient Mariner_!"
"That--that's what I was laughing at," Arcot explained, wiping his eyes.
"Four big, brave explorers, scared of their own shadows!"
"The light from our own ship has come back to us, due to the intense
curvature of the space which encloses us. In normal space, a light ray
would take hundreds of millions of years to travel all the way around
the Universe and return to its point of origin. Theoretically, it would
be possible to photograph our own Galaxy as it was thousands of
millennia ago by the light which left it then and has traveled all the
way around the curvature of space.
"But our space has such terrific curvature that it only takes a fraction
of a second for light to make the trip. It has gone all the way around
our little cosmos and come back again.
"If we'd shot at it, we would have really done ourselves in! The ray
beam would go around and hit us from behind!"
"Say, that is a nice proposition!" laughed Fuller. "Then we'll be
accompanied by those ghosts all the way? There goes the spirit 'nine
fathoms deep' which moves the ship--the ghosts that work the sails. This
will be a real _Ancient Mariner_ trip!"
It was like that famed voyage in another way, too. The men found little
to do as they passed on at high speed through the vast realm of space.
The chronometer pointed out the hours with exasperating slowness. The
six hours that were to elapse before the first stop seemed as many days.
They had thought of this trip as a wonderful adventure in itself, but
the soundless continued monotony was depressing. They wandered around,
aimlessly. Wade tried to sleep, but after lying strapped in his bunk for
half an hour, he gave up in despair.
Arcot saw that the strain of doing nothing was not going to be good for
his little crew and decided to see what could be done about it.
He went down to the laboratory and looked for inspiration. He found it.
"Hey! Morey! Wade! Fuller! Come on down here! I've got an idea!" he
called.
They came to find him looking meditatively at the power pack from one of
the flying suits he had designed. He had taken the lux metal case off
and was looking at the neat apparatus that lay within.
"These are equipped for use with the space suits, of course," Morey
pointed out, "and that gives us protection against gases. But I wonder
if we might install protection against mechanical injury--with intent to
damage aforethought! In other words, why not equip these suits with a
small invisibility apparatus? We have it on the ship, but we might need
personal protection, too."
"Great idea," said Wade, "provided you can find room in that case."
"I think we can. We won't need to add anything but a few tuning devices,
really, and they don't take a whale of a lot of power."
Arcot pointed out the places where they could be put; also, he replaced
some of the old induction coils with one of his new storage cells and
got far higher efficiency from the tubes.
But principally, it was something to do.
Indeed, it was so thoroughly something to do that the six hours had
almost elapsed before they realized it. In a very short time, they
returned again to the control room and strapped themselves in.
Arcot reached toward the little red switch that controlled the titanic
energies of the huge coil below and pulled it back a quarter of the way.
"There go the ghosts!" he said. The images had quickly disappeared,
seemingly leaping away from them at terrific speed as the space in which
the ship was enclosed opened out more and more and the curvature
decreased. They were further away from themselves!
Easing back a quarter at a time, to prevent sparks again flying about in
the atmosphere of the ship, Arcot cut the power to zero, and the ship
was standing still once more.
They hurriedly dived to the observatory and looked eagerly out the
window.
Far, far behind them, floating in the marvelous, soft, utter blackness
of space, was a shining disc made up of myriads of glowing points. And
it didn't seem to be a huge thing at a great distance, but simply a
small glowing object a few feet outside the window.
So perfectly clear was their view through the lux metal wall and the
black, empty space that all sense of distance was lost. It seemed more a
miniature model of their universe--a tiny thing that floated close
behind them, unwavering, shining with a faint light, a heatless
illumination that made everything in the darkened observatory glow very
faintly. It was the light of three hundred million suns seen at a
distance of three million million million miles! And it seemed small
because there was nothing with which to compare it.
It was an amazingly beautiful thing, that tiny floating disc of light.
Morey floated over to the cameras and began to take pictures.
"I'd like to take a color shot of that," he said a few minutes later,
"but that would require a direct shot through the reflector telescope
and a time exposure. And I can't do that; the ship is moving."
"Not enough to make any difference," Arcot contradicted. "We're moving
away from it in a straight line, and that thing is three quintillion
miles away. We're not moving fast enough to cause any measurable
contraction in a time exposure. As for having a steady platform, this
ship weighs a quarter of a million tons and is held by gyroscopes. We
won't shake it."
While Morey took the time exposure, Arcot looked at the enlarged image
in the telectroscope and tried to make angular measurements from the
individual stars. This he found impossible. Although he could spot
Betelgeuse and Antares because of their tremendous radiation, they were
too close together for measurements; the angle subtended was too small.
Finally, he decided to use the distance between Antares and S Doradus in
the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, one of the two clouds of stars which float
as satellites to the Galaxy itself.
To double-check, he used the radius of the Galaxy as base to calculate
the distance. The distances checked. The ship was five hundred thousand
light years from home!
After all the necessary observations were made, they swung the ship on
its axis and looked ahead for a landing place.
The nebulae ahead were still invisible to the naked eye except as
points, but the telectroscope finally revealed one as decidedly nearer
than the rest. It seemed to be a young Island Universe, for there was
still a vast cloud of gas and dust from which stars were yet to be born
in the central whorl--a single titanic gas cloud that stretched out
through a million billion miles of space.
"Shall we head for that?" asked Arcot at last, as Morey finished his
observations.
"I think it would be as good as any--there are more stars there than we
can hope to visit."
"Well, then, here we go!"
Arcot dived for the control room, while Morey shut off the telectroscope
and put the latest photographs in the file.
Suddenly space was snapping about him--they were off again. Another
shock of surging energy--another--the ship leaped forward at tremendous
speed--still greater--then they were rushing at top speed, and beside
them ran the ghost ships of the _Ancient Mariner_.
Morey pushed himself into the control room just as Arcot, Wade, and
Fuller were getting ready to start for the lab.
"We're off for quite a while, now," he said. "Our goal is about five
days away. I suggest we stop at the end of four days, make more
accurate measurements, then plan a closer stop.
"I think from now on we ought to sleep in relays, so that there will be
three of us awake at all times. I'll turn in now for ten hours, and then
someone else can sleep. Okay?"
It was agreed, and in the meantime the three on duty went down to the
lab to work.
Arcot had finished the installation of the invisibility apparatus in his
suit at the end of ten hours, much to his disappointment. He tested it,
then cast about for something to do while Wade and Morey added the
finishing touches to theirs.
Morey came down, and when Wade had finished his, which took another
quarter of an hour, he took the off duty shift.
Arcot had gone to the library, and Morey was at work down below. Fuller
had come up, looking for something to do, and had hit upon the excellent
idea of fixing a meal.
He had just begun his preparations in the kitchen when suddenly the
_Ancient Mariner_ gave a violent leap, and the men, not expecting any
weight, suddenly fell in different ways with terrific force!
Fuller fell half the length of the galley and was knocked out by the
blow. Wade, asleep in bed, was awakened violently by the shock, and
Morey, who had been strapped in his chair, was badly shaken.
Everyone cried out simultaneously--and Arcot was on his way to the
control room. The first shock was but a forerunner of the storm.
Suddenly the ship was hurled violently about; the air was shot through
with great burning sparks; the snapping hiss of electricity was
everywhere, and every pointed metal object was throwing streamers of
blue electric flame into the air! The ship rocked, heaved, and cavorted
wildly, as though caught in the play of titanic forces!
Scrambling wildly along the hand-holds, Arcot made his way towards the
control room, which was now above, now below, and now to one side of him
as the wildly variable acceleration shook the ship. Doggedly, he worked
his way up, frequently getting severe burns from the flaming sparks.
Below, in the power room, the relays were crashing in and out wildly.
Then, suddenly, a new sound was added just as Arcot pulled himself into
the control chair and strapped himself down. The radiation detector
buzzed out its screaming warning!
"COSMIC RAYS!" Arcot yelled. "HIGH CONCENTRATION!"
He slapped at the switch which shot the heavy relux screens across every
window in the ship.
There was a sudden crash and a fuse went out below--a fuse made of a
silver bar two feet thick! In an instant, the flames of the burning
sparks flared up and died. The ship cavorted madly, shaking mightily in
the titanic, cosmic forces that surrounded it--the forces that made the
highest energy form in the universe!
Arcot knew that nothing could be done with the power coil. It was
drained; the circuit was broken. He shifted in the molecular drive,
pushing the acceleration to four gravities, as high as the men could
stand.
And still the powerful ship was being tossed about, the plaything of
inconceivable forces. They lived only because the forces did not try to
turn the ship more violently, not because of the strength of the ship,
for nothing could resist the awful power around them.
As a guide, Arcot used the compass gyroscope, the only one not twisted
far out of its original position; with it, he managed to steer a fairly
straight course.
Meanwhile, in the power room, Wade and Morey were working frantically to
get the space-strain drive coil recharged. Despite the strength-sapping
strain of working under four gravities of acceleration, they managed to
get the auxiliary power unit into operation. In a few moments, they had
it pouring its energies into the coil-bank so that they could charge up
the central drive coil.
Another silver bar fuse was inserted, and Wade checked the relays to
make sure they were in working order.
Fuller, who had regained consciousness, worked his way laboriously down
to the power room carrying three space-suits. He had stopped in the lab
to get the power belts, and the three men quickly donned them to help
them overcome the four-gravity pull.
Another half hour sped by as the bucking ship forced its way through the
terrific field in space.
Suddenly they felt a terrific jolt again--then the ship was moving more
smoothly, and gradually it was calm. They were through!
"Have we got power for the space-strain drive yet?" Arcot called through
the intercom.
"Enough," Morey cried. "Try it!"
Arcot cut off the molecular motion drive, and threw in all the
space-control power he had. The ship was suddenly supercharged with
energy. It jarred suddenly--then was quiet. He allowed ten minutes to
pass, then he cut off the drive and allowed the ship to go into free
fall.
Morey's voice came over the intercom. "Arcot, things are really busted
up down here! We had to haywire half the drive together."
"I'll be right down. Every instrument on the ship seems to be out of
kilter!"
It was a good thing they had plenty of spare parts; some of the smaller
relays had burned out completely, and several of the power leads had
fused under the load that had been forced through them.
The space-strain drive had been leaking energy at a terrific rate;
without further repair, it could not function much longer.
In the power room, Arcot surveyed the damage. "Well, boys, we'd better
get to work. We're stranded here until we get that drive repaired!"