"Depends entirely on that star; let's see if we can get a focus on it."
At the orbital velocity of the ship, focussing on the star was indeed a
difficult thing to do. It took them well over an hour to get the image
centered in the screen without its drifting off toward one edge; it took
even longer to get the focus close enough to a sphere to give them a
definite reading on the instruments. The image had started out as a
streak, but by taking smaller and smaller sections of the streak at the
proper times, they managed to get a good, solid image. But to get it
bright enough was another problem; they were only picking up a fraction
of the light, and it had to be amplified greatly to make a visible
image.
When they finally got what they were looking for, Morey gazed steadily
at the image. "Now the job is to figure the distance. And we haven't got
much parallax to work with."
"If we compute in the timing in our blinker system at opposite sides of
the orbit, I think we can do it," Arcot said.
They went to work on the problem. When Fuller and Wade showed up, they
were given work to do--Morey gave them equations to solve without
telling them to what the figures applied.
Finally Arcot said: "Their period about the common center of gravity is
thirty-nine hours, as I figure it."
Morey nodded. "Check. And that gives us a distance of two million miles
apart."
"Just what are you two up to?" asked Fuller. "What good is another star?
The one we're interested in is this freak underneath us."
"No," Arcot corrected, "we're interested in getting _away_ from the one
beneath us, which is an entirely different matter. If we were midway
between this star and that one, the gravitational effects of the two
would be cancelled out, since we would be pulled as hard in one
direction as the other. Then we'd be free of both pulls and could
escape!
"If we could get into that neutral area long enough to turn on our space
strain drive, we could get away between them fast. Of course, a lot of
our energy would be eaten up, but we'd get away.
"That's our only hope," Arcot concluded.
"Yes, and what a whale of a hope it is," Wade snorted sarcastically.
"How are you going to get out to a point halfway between these two stars
when you don't have enough power to lift this ship a few miles?"
"If Mahomet can not go to the mountain," misquoted Arcot, "then the
mountain must come to Mahomet."
"What are you going to do?" Wade asked in exasperation. "Beat Joshua? He
made the sun stand still, but this is a job of throwing them around!"
"It is," agreed Arcot quietly, "and I intend to throw that star in such
a way that we can escape between the twin fields! We can escape between
the hammer and the anvil as millions of millions of millions of tons of
matter crash into each other."
"And you intend to swing that?" asked Wade in awe as he thought of the
spectacle there would be when two suns fell into each other. "Well, I
don't want to be around."
"You haven't any choice," Arcot grinned. Then his face grew serious.
"What I want to do is simple. We have the molecular ray. Those stars are
hot. They don't fall into each other because they are rotating about
each other. Suppose that rotation were stopped--stopped suddenly and
completely? The molecular ray acts catalytically; we won't supply the
power to stop that star, the star itself will. All we have to do is
cause the molecules to move in a direction opposite to the rotation.
We'll supply the impulse, and the star will supply the energy!
"Our job will be to break away when the stars get close enough; we are
really going to hitch our wagon to a star!
"The mechanics of the job are simple. We will have to calculate when and
how long to use the power, and when and how quickly to escape. We'll
have to use the main power board to generate the ray and project it
instead of the little ray units. With luck, we ought to be free of this
star in three days!"
Work was started at once. They had a chance of life in sight, and they
had every intention of taking advantage of it! The calculating machines
they had brought would certainly prove worth their mass in this one use.
The observations were extremely difficult because the ship was rocketing
around the star in such a rapid orbit. The calculations of the mass and
distance and orbital motion of the other star were therefore very
difficult, but the final results looked good.
The other star and this one formed a binary, the two being of only
slightly different mass and rotating about each other at a distance of
roughly two million miles.
The next problem was to calculate the time of fall from that point,
assuming that it would stop instantaneously, which would be
approximately true.
The actual fall would take only seven hours under the tremendous
acceleration of the two masses! Since the stars would fall toward each
other, the ship would be drawn toward the falling mass, and since their
orbit around the star took only a fraction of a second to complete, they
had to make sure they were in the right position at the halfway point
just before collision occurred. Also, their orbit would be greatly
perturbed as the star approached, and it was necessary to calculate that
in, too.
Arcot calculated that in twenty-two hours, forty-six minutes, they would
be in the most favorable position to start the fall. They could have
started sooner, but there were some changes that had to be made in the
wiring of the ship before they could start using the molecular ray at
full power.
"Well," said Wade as he finally finished the laborious computations, "I
hope we don't make a mistake and get caught between the two! And what
happens if we find we haven't stopped the star after all?"
"If we don't hit it exactly the first time," Morley replied, "we'll have
to juggle the ray until we do."
They set to work at once, installing the heavy leads to the ray
projectors, which were on the outside of the hull in countersunk
recesses. Morey and Wade had to go outside the ship to help attach the
cables.
Out in space, floating about the ship, they were still weightless, for
they, too, were supported by centrifugal force.
The work of readjusting the projectors for greater power was completed
in an hour and a quarter, which still left over twenty hours before they
could use them. During the next ten hours, they charged the great
storage coils to capacity, leaving the circuits to them open, controlled
by the relays only. That would keep the coils charged, ready to start.
Finally, Wade dusted off his hands and said: "We're all ready to go
mechanically, and I think it would be wise if we were ready physically,
too. I know we're not very tired, but if we sit around in suspense we'll
be as nervous as cats when the time comes. I suggest we take a couple of
sleeping tablets and turn in. If we use a mild shock to awaken us, we
won't oversleep."
The others agreed to the plan and prepared for their wait.
Awakened two hours before the actual moment of action, Wade prepared
breakfast, and Morey took observations. He knew just where the star
should be according to their calculations, and looked for it there. He
breathed a sigh of relief--it was exactly in place! Their mathematics
they had been sure of, but on such a rapidly moving machine, it was
exceedingly difficult to make good observations.
The two hours seemed to drag interminably, but at last Arcot signalled
for the full power of the molecular rays. They waited, breathlessly, for
some response. Nearly twenty seconds later, the other sun went out.
"We did it!" said Wade in a hushed voice. It was almost a shock to
realize that this ship had power enough to extinguish a sun!
Arcot and Morey weren't awed; they didn't have time. There were other
things to do and do fast.
They had checked the time required for them to see that the white dwarf
had gone out. Half of this gave them the distance from the star in light
seconds.
The screen had already been rigged to flash the information into a
computer, which in turn gave a time signal to the robot pilot that would
turn on the drive at precisely the right instant. There was no time for
human error here; the velocities were too great and the time for error
too small.
Then they waited. They had to wait for seven hours spinning dizzily
around an improbably tiny star with an equally improbably titanic
gravitational field. A star only a couple of dozens of miles across, and
yet so dense that it weighed half a million times as much as the Earth!
And they had to wait while another star like it, chilled now to absolute
zero, fell toward them!
"I wish we could stay around to see the splash," Arcot said. "It's going
to be something to see. All the kinetic energy of those two masses
slamming into each other is going to be a blaze of light that will
really be something!"
Wade was looking nervously at the telectroscope plate. "I wish we could
see that other sun. I don't like the idea of a thing that big creeping
up on us in the dark."
"Calm down," Morey said quietly. "It's out of our hands now; we took a
chance, and it was a chance we _had_ to take. If you want to watch
something, watch Junior down there. It's going to start doing some
pretty interesting tricks."
As the dense black sun approached them, Junior, as Morey had called it,
did begin to do tricks. At first they seemed to be optical effects, as
though the eye itself were playing tricks. The red, glowing ball beneath
them began to grow transparent around its surface, leaving an opaque red
core which seemed to be shrinking slowly.
"What's happening?" Fuller asked.
"Our orbit around the star is becoming more and more elliptical," Arcot
replied. "As the other sun pulls us, the star beneath us grows smaller
with the distance; then, as we begin to fall back toward it, it grows
larger again. Since this is taking place many hundreds of times per
second, the visual pictures all seem to blend in together."
"Watch the clock," Morey said suddenly, pointing.
The men watched tensely as the hand moved slowly around.
"Ten--nine--eight--seven--six--five--four--three--two--one--ZERO!"
A relay slammed home, and almost instantaneously, everyone on the ship
was slammed into unconsciousness.