Below the ship lay the unfamiliar panorama of an unknown world that
circled, frozen, around a dim, unknown sun, far out in space. Cold and
bleak, the low, rolling hills below were black, bare rock, coated in
spots with a white sheen of what appeared to be snow, though each of the
men realized it must be frozen air. Here and there ran strange rivers
of deep blue which poured into great lakes and seas of blue liquid.
There were mighty mountains of deep blue crystal looming high, and in
the hollows and cracks of these crystal mountains lay silent, motionless
seas of deep blue, unruffled by any breeze in this airless world. It was
a world that lay frozen under a dim, dead sun.
They continued over the broad sweep of the level, crystalline plain as
the bleak rock disappeared behind them. This world was about ten
thousand miles in diameter, and its surface gravity about a quarter
greater than that of Earth.
On and on they swept, swinging over the planet at an altitude of less
than a thousand feet, viewing the unutterably desolate scene of the
cold, dead world.
Then, ahead of them loomed a bleak, dark mass of rock again. They had
crossed the frozen ocean and were coming to land again--a land no more
solid than the sea.
Everywhere lay the deep drifts of snow, and here and there, through
valleys, ran the streams of bright blue.
"Look!" cried Morey in sudden surprise. Far ahead and to their left
loomed a strange formation of jutting vertical columns, covered with the
white burden of snow. Arcot turned a powerful searchlight on it, and it
stood out brightly against the vast snowfield. It was a dead, frozen
city.
As they looked at it, Arcot turned the ship and headed for it without a
word.
It was hard to realize the enormity of the catastrophe that had brought
a cold, bleak death to the population of this world--death to an
intelligent race.
Arcot finally spoke. "I'll land the ship. I think it will be safe for us
all to leave. Get out the suits and make sure all the tanks are charged
and the heaters working. It will be colder here than in space. Out
there, we were only cooled by radiation, but those streams are probably
liquid nitrogen, oxygen, and argon, and there's a slight atmosphere of
hydrogen, helium and neon cooled to about fifty degrees Absolute. We'll
be cooled by conduction and convection."
As the others got the suits ready, he lowered the ship gently to the
snowy ground. It sank into nearly ten feet of snow. He turned on the
powerful searchlight, and swept it around the ship. Under the warm
beams, the frozen gasses evaporated, and in a few moments he had cleared
the area around the ship.
Morey and the others came back with their suits. Arcot donned his, and
adjusted his weight to ten pounds with the molecular power unit.
A short time later, they stepped out of the airlock onto the ice field
of the frozen world. High above them glowed the dim, blue-white disc of
the tiny sun, looking like little more than a bright star.
Adjusting the controls on the suits, the four men lifted into the
tenuous air and headed toward the city, moving easily about ten feet
above the frozen wastes of the snow field.
"The thing I don't understand," Morey said as they shot toward the city,
"is why this planet is here at all. The intense radiation from the sun
when it went supernova should have vaporized it!"
Arcot pointed toward a tall, oddly-shaped antenna that rose from the
highest building of the city. "There's your answer. That antenna is
similar to those we found on the planets of the Black Star; it's a heat
screen. They probably had such antennas all over the planet.
"Unfortunately, the screen's efficiency goes up as the fourth power of
the temperature. It could keep out the terrific heat of a supernova, but
couldn't keep in the heat of the planet after the supernova had died.
The planet was too cool to make the screen work efficiently!"
At last they came to the outskirts of the dead city. The vertical walls
of the buildings were free of snow, and they could see the blank,
staring eyes of the windows, and within, the bleak, empty rooms. They
swept on through the frozen streets until they came to one huge building
in the center. The doors of bronze had been closed, and through the
windows they could see that the room had been piled high with some sort
of insulating material, evidently used as a last-ditch attempt to keep
out the freezing cold.
"Shall we break in?" asked Arcot.
"We may as well," Morey's voice answered over the radio. "There may be
some records we could take back to Earth and have deciphered. In a time
like this, I imagine they would leave some records, hoping that some
race _might_ come and find them."
They worked with molecular ray pistols for fifteen minutes tearing a way
through. It was slow work because they had to use the heat ray pistols
to supply the necessary energy for the molecular motion.
When they finally broke through, they found they had entered on the
second floor; the deep snow had buried the first. Before them stretched
a long, richly decorated hall, painted with great colored murals.
The paintings displayed a people dressed in a suit of some soft, white
cloth, with blond hair that reached to their shoulders. They were
shorter and more heavily built than Earthmen, perhaps, but there was a
grace to them that denied the greater gravity of their planet. The
murals portrayed a world of warm sunlight, green plants, and tall trees
waving in a breeze--a breeze of air that now lay frozen on the stone
floors of their buildings.
Scene after scene they saw--then they came to a great hall. Here they
saw hundreds of bodies; people wrapped in heavy cloth blankets. And over
the floor of the room lay little crystals of green.
Wade looked at the little crystals for a long time, and then at the
people who lay there, perfectly preserved by the utter cold. They seemed
only sleeping--men, women, and children, sleeping under a blanket of
soft snow that evaporated and disappeared as the energy of the lights
fell on it. There was one little group the men looked at before they
left the room of death. There were three in it--a young man, a fair,
blonde young woman who seemed scarcely more than a girl, and between
them, a little child. They were sleeping, arms about each other, warm in
the arms of Death, the kindly Reliever of Pain.
Arcot turned and rose, flying swiftly down the long corridor toward the
door.
"That was not meant for us," he said. "Let's leave."
The others followed.
"But let's see what records they left," he went on. "It may be that they
wanted us to know their tragic story. Let's see what sort of
civilization they had."
"Their chemistry was good, at least," said Wade. "Did you notice those
green crystals? A quick, painless poison gas to relieve them of the
struggle against the cold."
They went down to the first floor level, where there was a single great
court. There were no pillars, only a vast, smooth floor.
"They had good architecture," said Morey. "No pillars under all the vast
load of that building."
"And the load is even greater under this gravity," remarked Arcot.
In the center of the room was a great, golden bronze globe resting on a
platform of marble. It must have been new when this world froze, for
there was no sign of corrosion or oxidation. The men flew over to it and
stood beside it, looking at the great sphere, nearly fifteen feet in
diameter.
"A globe of their world," said Fuller, looking at it with interest.
"Yes," agreed Arcot, "and it was set up after they were sure the cold
would come, from the looks of it. Let's take a look at it." He flew up
to the top of it and viewed it from above. The whole globe was a
carefully chiseled relief map, showing seas, mountains, and continents.
"Arcot--come here a minute," called Morey. Arcot dropped down to where
Morey was looking at the globe. On the edge of one of the continents was
a small raised globe, and around the globe, a circle had been etched.
"I think this is meant to represent this globe," Morey said. "I'm almost
certain it represents this very spot. Now look over here." He pointed to
a spot which, according to the scale of the globe, was about five
thousand miles away. Projecting from the surface of the bronze globe
was a little silver tower.
"They want us to go there," continued Morey. "This was erected only
shortly before the catastrophe; they must have put relics there that
they want us to get. They must have guessed that eventually intelligent
beings would cross space; I imagine they have other maps like this in
every large city.
"I think it's our duty to visit that cairn."
"I quite agree," assented Arcot. "The chance of other men visiting this
world is infinitely small."
"Then let's leave this City of the Dead!" said Wade.
It gave them a sense of depression greater than that inspired by the
vast loneliness of space. One is never so lonely as when he is with the
dead, and the men began to realize that the original _Ancient Mariner_
had been more lonely with strange companions than they had been in the
depths of ten million light years of space.
They went back to the ship, floating through the last remnants of this
world's atmosphere, back through the chill of the frozen gases to the
cheering, warm interior of the ship.
It was a contrast that made each of them appreciate more fully the gift
that a hot, blazing sun really is. Perhaps that was what made Fuller
ask: "If this happened to a star so much like our sun, why couldn't it
happen to Sol?"
"Perhaps it may," said Morey softly. "But the eternal optimism of man
keeps us saying: 'It can't happen here.' And besides--" He put a hand on
the wall of the ship, "--we don't ever have to worry about anything like
that now. Not with ships like this to take us to a new sun--a new
planet."
Arcot lifted the ship and flew over the cold, frozen ground beneath
them, following the route indicated on the great globe in the dead city.
Mile after mile of frozen ice fields flew by as they shot over it at
three miles per second.
Suddenly, the bleak bulk of a huge mountain loomed gigantic before them.
Arcot reversed the power and brought the ship to a stop. With the
powerful searchlight, he swept the area, looking for the tower he knew
should be here. At last, he made it out, a pyramid rather than a tower,
and coated over with ice. They soon thawed out the frozen gasses by
playing the energy of three powerful searchlights upon them, and in a
few minutes the glint of gold showed through the melting ice and show.
"It looks," said Wade, "as though they have an outer wall of gold over a
strong wall of iron or steel to protect it from corrosion. Certainly
gold doesn't have enough tensile strength to hold itself up under this
gravity--not in such masses as that."
Arcot brought the ship down beside the tower and the men once more went
out through the airlock into the cold of the almost airless world. They
flew across to the pyramid and looked for some means of entrance. In
several places, they noticed hieroglyphics carved in great, foot-high
characters. They searched in vain for a door until they noticed that the
pyramid was not perfect, but truncated, leaving a flat area on top. The
only joint in the walls seemed to be there, but there was no handle or
visible methods of opening the door.
Arcot turned his powerful light on the surface and searched carefully
for some opening device. He found a bas-relief engraving of a hand
pointing to a corner of the door. He looked more closely and found a
small jewel-like lens set in the metal.
Suddenly the men felt a vibration! There was a heavy click, and the door
panel began to drop slowly.
"Get on it!" Arcot cried. "We can always break our way out if we're
trapped!"
The four men leaped on it and sank slowly with it. The massive walls of
the tower were nearly five feet thick, and made of some tough, white
metal.
"Pure iron!" diagnosed Wade. "Or perhaps a silicon-iron alloy. Not as
strong as steel, but very resistant to corrosion."
When the elevator stopped, they found themselves in a great chamber that
was obviously a museum of the lost race. All around the walls were
arranged models, books, and diagrams.
"We can never hope to take all this in our ship!" said Arcot, looking at
the great collection. "Look--there's an old winged airplane! And a steam
engine--and that's an electric motor! And that thing looks like some
kind of an electric battery."
"But we can't take all that stuff," objected Fuller.
"No," Morey agreed. "I think our best bet would be to take all the books
we can--making sure we get the introductory ones, so we can read the
language.
"See--over there--they have marked those shelves with a single vertical
mark. The ones next to them have two vertical marks, and next ones
three. I suggest we load up with those books and take them to the ship."
The rest agreed, and they began carrying armloads of books, flying out
through the top of the pyramid to the ship and back for more.
Instead of flying back to the pyramid for the last load, Arcot announced
that he was going to leave a note for anyone who might come here later.
While the others went back for the last load, he worked at drawing the
"note".
"Let's see your masterpiece," said Morey as the three men returned to
the ship with the last of the books.
Arcot had used a piece of tough, heavy plastic which would resist any
corrosion the cold, almost airless world might have to offer.
Near the top, he had drawn a representation of their ship, and beneath
it a representation of the route they had taken from universe to
universe. The galaxy they were in was represented by a cloud of gas, its
main identifying feature. Underneath the dotted line of their route
through space, he had printed "200,000,000,000, _u_".
Then followed a little table. The numeral "1" followed by a straight
bar, then "2" followed by two bars, and so on up to ten. Ten was
represented by ten bars and, in addition, an S-shaped sign. Twenty was
next, followed by twenty bars and two S-shaped signs. Thus he had
worked up to "100".
The system he used would make it clear to any reasoning creature that he
had used a decimal system and that the zeroes meant ten times.
Next below, he had drawn the planetary system of the frozen world, and
the distance from the planet they were on to the central sun he labeled
"_u_". Thus, the finders could reason that they had come a distance of
two hundred billion units, where a distance of three hundred million
miles was taken as the unit; they had, then, come from another galaxy.
Certainly any creature with enough intelligence to reach this frozen
world would understand this!
"Since the year of this planet is approximately eight times our own,"
Arcot continued, "I am indicating that we came here approximately five
hundred years after the catastrophe." He pointed at several of the other
drawings.
They left the message in the tower, and Arcot closed the door, leaving
the pyramid exactly as it had been before they had come.
"Say!" Morey commented, "how did you open and close that door, anyway?"
Arcot grinned. "Didn't you notice the jewel at the corner? It was the
lens of a photoelectric cell. My flashlight opened the door. I didn't
figure it out; it just worked accidentally."
Morey raised an eyebrow. "But if the darned thing is so simple, any
creature, intelligent or not, might be able to get in and destroy the
records!"
Arcot looked at him. "And where are your savages going to come from?
There are none on this planet, and anyone intelligent enough to build a
spaceship isn't going to destroy the contents of the tower."
"Oh." Morey looked a little sheepish.
They went into the airlock and took off their suits. Then they began
packing the precious books in specimen cases that had been brought for
the purpose of preserving such things.
When the last of them was carefully stowed, they returned to the
control room. They looked silently out across this strange, dead world,
thinking how much it must have been like Earth. It was dead now, and
frozen forever. The low hills that stretched out beneath them were dimly
lighted by the weak rays of a shrunken sun. Three hundred million miles
away, it glowed so weakly that this world received only a little more
heat than it might have received from a small coal fire a mile away.
So weakly it flared that in this thin atmosphere of hydrogen and helium,
its little corona glowed about it plainly, and even the stars around it
shone brilliantly. The men could see one constellation that grouped
itself in the outlines of a dragon, with the sun of this system as its
cold, baleful eye.
Gradually, Arcot lifted the ship, and, as they headed out into space,
they could see the dim frozen plains fall behind. It was as if a load of
oppressing loneliness parted from them as they flew out into the vast
spaces of the eternal stars.
X
Arcot looked speculatively at the star field in the great broad window
before him. "We'll want to find another G-0 sun, naturally, but I don't
think we ought to go directly from here. If we did, we'd have to do a
lot of backtracking to get back to this dead star. I suggest we go back
to the edge of this galaxy, taking pictures on the way out, so that any
future investigators can come in directly. It'll only take a few hours."
"I think you're right," agreed Morey. "Besides, that will give us a
wider choice of stars to pick our next G-0 from. Let's get going."
Arcot moved the red switch, and the ship shot away at half speed. They
watched the green image of the white dwarf fade and then suddenly flare
up and become bright again as they outraced the light that had left it
five centuries before.
They stopped and took more photographs so that the path could be marked.
They stopped every light century until they reached a point where the
star was merely a dim point, almost lost in the myriad of stars around
it.
Then out to the edge of the galaxy they went, out toward their own
universe.
"Arcot," Morey called, "let's go out, say one million light years into
space, at an angle to this galaxy, and see if we can get both galaxies
on one plate. It will make navigation between them easier."
"Good idea. We can get out and back in one day--and this 'time' won't
count back on Earth, anyway." Since they would travel in the
space-strain all the time, it would not count as Earth time.
Arcot pushed the red control all the way forward, and the ship began to
move at its top velocity of twenty-four light years per second. The
hours dragged heavily, as they had when they were coming in, and Arcot
remained alone on watch while the others went to their rooms for some
sleep, strapping their weightless bodies securely in the bunks.
It was hours later when Morey awoke with a sudden premonition of
trouble. He looked at the chronometer on the wall--he had slept twelve
hours! They had gone beyond the million light year mark! It didn't
matter, except it showed that something had happened to Arcot.
Something had. Arcot was sound asleep in the middle of the
library--exactly in the middle, floating in the room ten feet from each
wall.
Morey called out to him, and Arcot awoke with a guilty start. "A fine
sentry you make," said Morey caustically. "Can't even keep awake when
all you have to do is sit here and see that we don't run into anything.
We've gone more than our million light years already, and we're still
going strong. Come on--snap out of it!"
"I'm sorry--I apologize--I know I shouldn't have slept, but it was so
perfectly quiet here except for your deep-toned, musical snores that I
couldn't help it," grinned Arcot. "Get me down from here and we'll
stop."
"Get you down, nothing!" Morey snapped. "You stay right there while I
call the others and we decide what's to be done with a sleeping sentry."
Morey turned and left to wake the others.
He had awakened Wade and told him what had happened, and they were on
their way to wake up Fuller, when suddenly the air of the ship crackled
around them! The space was changing! They were coming out of hyperspace!
In amazement, Morey and Wade looked at each other. They knew that Arcot
was still floating helplessly in the middle of the room, but--
"Hold on, you brainless apes! We're turning around!" came Arcot's voice,
full of suppressed mirth.
Suddenly they were both plastered against the wall of the ship under
four gravities of acceleration! Unable to walk, they could only crawl
laboriously toward the control room, calling to Arcot to shut off the
power.
When Morey had left him stranded in the library, Arcot had decided it
was high time he got to the floor. Quickly, he looked around for a means
of doing so. Near him, floating in the air, was the book he had been
reading, but it was out of reach. He had taken off his boots when he
started to read, so the Fuller rocket method was out. It seemed
hopeless.
Then, suddenly, came the inspiration! Quickly, he slipped off his shirt
and began waving it violently in the air. He developed a velocity of
about two inches a second--not very fast, but fast enough. By the time
he had put his shirt back on, he had reached the wall.
After that, it was easy to shoot himself over to the door, out into the
corridor and into the control room without being seen by Morey, who was
in Wade's room.
Just as Wade and Morey reached the doorway to the control room, Arcot
decided it was time to shut the power off. Both of the men, laboring
under more than eight hundred pounds of weight, were suddenly
weightless. All the strength of their powerful muscles were expended in
hurling them against the far wall.
The complaints were loud, but they finally simmered down to an earnest
demand to know how in the devil Arcot had managed to get off dead
center.
"Why, that was easy," he said airily. "I just turned on a little power;
I fell under the influence of the weight and then it was easy to get to
the control room."
"Come on," Wade demanded. "The truth! How did you get here?"
"Why, I just pushed myself here."
"Yes; no doubt. But how did you get hold of anything to push?"
"I just took a handful of air and threw it away and reached the wall."
"Oh, of course--and how did you hold the air?"
"I just took some air and threw it away and reached the wall."
Which was all they could learn. Arcot was going to keep his system
secret, it seemed.
"At any rate," Arcot continued, "I am back in the control room, where I
belong, and you are not in the observatory where you belong. Now get out
of my territory!"
Morey pushed himself back to the observatory, and after a few minutes,
his voice came over the intercom. "Let's move on a bit more, Arcot. We
still can't get both galaxies on the same plate. Let's go on for another
hour and take our pictures from that point."
Fuller had awakened and come in in the meantime, and he wanted to know
why they didn't take some pictures from this spot.
"No point in it," said Morey. "We have the ones we took coming in; what
we want is a wide-angle shot."
Arcot threw on the space-strain drive once more, and they headed on at
top speed.
They were all in the control room, watching the instruments and
joking--principally the latter--when it happened. One instant they were
moving smoothly, weightlessly along. The next instant, the ship rocked
as though it had been struck violently! The air was a snapping inferno
of shooting sparks, and there came the sharp crash of the suddenly
volatilized silver bar that was their main power fuse. Simultaneously,
they were hurled forward with terrific force; the straps that held them
in place creaked with the sudden strain, and the men felt weak and
faint.
Consciousness nearly left them; they had been burned in a dozen places
by the leaping sparks.
Then it was over. Except that the ghost ships no longer followed them,
the _Ancient Mariner_ seemed unchanged. Around them, they could see the
dim glowing of the galaxies.
"Brother! We came near something!" Arcot cried. "It may be a wandering
star! Take a look around, quick!"
But the dark of space seemed utterly empty around them as they coasted
weightless through space. Then Arcot snapped off the lights of the
control room, and in a moment his eyes had become accustomed to the dim
lights.
It was dead ahead of them. It was a dull red glow, so dim it was
scarcely visible. Arcot realized it was a dead star.
"There it is, Morey!" he said. "A dead star, directly ahead of us! Good
God, how close are we?"
They were falling straight toward the dim red bulk.
"How far are we from it?" Fuller asked.
"At least several million--" Morey began. Then he looked at the distance
recorded on the meteor detector. "ARCOT! FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE DO SOMETHING!
THAT THING IS ONLY A FEW HUNDRED MILES AWAY!"
"There's only one thing to do," Arcot said tightly. "We can never hope
to avoid that thing; we haven't got the power. I'm going to try for an
orbit around it. We'll fall toward it and give the ship all the
acceleration she'll take. There's no time to calculate--I'll just pile
on the speed until we don't fall into it."
The others, strapped into the control chairs, prepared themselves for
the acceleration to come.
If the _Ancient Mariner_ had dropped toward the star from an infinite
distance, Arcot could have applied enough power to put the ship in a
hyperbolic orbit which would have carried them past the star. But they
had come in on the space drive, and had gotten fairly close before the
gravitational field had drained the power from the main coil, and it was
not until the space field had broken that they had started to accelerate
toward the star. Their velocity would not be great enough to form an
escape orbit.
Even now, they would fall far short of enough velocity to get into an
elliptical orbit unless they used the molecular drive.
Arcot headed toward one edge of the star, and poured power into the
molecular drive. The ship shot forward under an additional five and a
half gravities of acceleration. Their velocity had been five thousand
miles per second when they entered hyperspace, and they were swiftly
adding to their original velocity.
They did not, of course, feel the pull of the sun, since they were in
free fall in its field; they could only feel the five and a half
gravities of the molecular drive. Had they been able to experience the
pull of the star, they would have been crushed by their own weight.
Their speed was mounting as they drew nearer to the star, and Arcot was
forcing the ship on with all the additional power he could get. But he
knew that the only hope they had was to get the ship in a closed ellipse
around the star, and a closed ellipse meant that they would be forever
bound to the star as a planet! Helpless, for not even the titanic power
of the _Ancient Mariner_ could enable them to escape!
As the dull red of the dead sun ballooned toward them, Arcot said: "I
think we'll make an orbit, all right, but we're going to be awfully
close to the surface of that thing!"
The others were quiet; they merely watched Arcot and the star as Arcot
made swift movements with the controls, doing all he could to establish
them in an orbit that would be fairly safe.
It seemed like an eternity--five and a half gravities of acceleration
held the men in their chairs almost as well as the straps of the
antiacceleration units that bound them. When a man weighs better than
half a ton, he doesn't feel like moving much.
Fuller whispered to Morey out of the corner of his sagging mouth. "What
on Earth--I mean, what in Space is that thing? We're within only a few
hundred miles, you said, so it must be pretty small. How could it pull
us around like this?"
"It's a dead white dwarf--a 'black dwarf', you might say," Morey
replied. "As the density of such matter increases, the volume of the
star depends less and less on its temperature. In a dwarf with the mass
of the sun, the temperature effect is negligible; it's the action of the
forces within the electron-nucleon gas which makes up the star that
reigns supreme.
"It's been shown that if a white dwarf--or a black one--is increased in
mass, it begins to decrease sharply in volume after a certain point is
reached. In fact, no _cold_ star can exist with a volume greater than
about one and a half times the mass of the sun--as the mass increases
and the pressure goes up, the star shrinks in volume because of the
degenerate matter in it. At a little better than 1.4 times the mass of
the sun--our sun, I mean: Old Sol--the star would theoretically collapse
to a point.
"That has almost happened in this case. The actual limit is when the
star has reached the density of a neutron, and this star hasn't
collapsed that far by a long shot.
"But that star is only forty kilometers--_or less than twenty-five
miles_ in diameter!"
It took nearly two hours of careful juggling to get an orbit which
Arcot considered reasonably circular.
And when they finally did, Wade looked at the sky above them and
shouted: "Say, look! What are all those streaks?"
Arcing up from the surface of the dull red plain below them and going
over the ship, were several dim streaks of light across the sky. One of
them was brighter than the rest, a bright white streak. The streaks
didn't move; they seemed to have been painted on the sky overhead,
glowing bands of unwavering light.
"Those," said Arcot, "are the nebulae. That wide streak is the one we
just left. The bright streak must be a nearby star.
"They look like streaks because we're moving so fast in so small an
orbit." He pointed to the red star beneath them. "We're less than twenty
miles from the center of that thing! We're almost exactly thirty
kilometers from its center, or about ten kilometers from its surface!
But, because of it's great mass, our orbital velocity is something
terrific!
"We're going around that thing better than three hundred times every
second; our 'year' is three milliseconds long! Our orbital velocity is
_seven hundred thousand kilometers per second_!
"We're moving along at about a fifth of the speed of light!"
"Are we safe in this orbit?" Fuller asked.
"Safe enough," said Arcot bitterly. "So damned safe that I don't see how
we'll ever break free. We can't pull away with all the power on this
ship. We're trapped!
"Well, I'm worn out from working under all that gravity; let's eat and
get some sleep."
"I don't feel like sleeping," said Fuller. "You may call this safe, but
it would only take an instant to fall down to the surface of that thing
there." He looked down at their inert, but titanically powerful enemy
whose baleful glow seemed even now to be burning their funeral pyre.
"Well," said Arcot, "falling into it and flying off into space are two
things you don't have to worry about. If we started toward it, we'd be
falling, and our velocity would increase; as a result, we'd bounce right
back out again. The magnitude of the force required to make us fall into
that sun is appalling! The gravitational pull on us now amounts to about
five _billion_ tons, which is equalized by the centrifugal force of our
orbital velocity. Any tendency to change it would be like trying to bend
a spring with that much resistance.
"We'd require a tremendous force to make us either fall into that
star--or get away from it.
"To escape, we have to lift this ship out against gravity. That means
we'd have to lift about five million tons of mass. As we get farther
out, our weight will decrease as the gravitational attraction drops off,
but we would need such vast amounts of energy that they are beyond human
conception.
"We have burned up two tons of matter recharging the coils, and are now
using another two tons to recharge them again. We need at least four
tons to spare, and we only started out with twenty. We simply haven't
got fuel enough to break loose from this star's gravitational hold, vast
as the energy of matter is. Let's eat, and then we can sleep on the
problem."
Wade cooked a meal for them, and they ate in silence, trying to think of
some way out of their dilemma. Then they tried to sleep on the problem,
as Arcot had suggested, but it was difficult to relax. They were
physically tired; they had gone through such great strains, even in the
short time that they had been maneuvering, that they were very tired.
Under a pull five times greater than normal gravity, they had tired in
one-fifth the time they would have at one gravity, but their brains were
still wide awake, trying to think of some way--_any way_--to get away
from the dark sun.
But at last sleep came.