And then McBride was in the _Haywire Queen_ and the air lock was
cracked. The big ship lifted gently and zipped out of the lock with a
casual disregard for distances. Unlike Drake's precision take-off, the
_Haywire Queen_ went through the open door with the air of wanting to
leave quickly because there were better things to do than worry about
hitting the center plus or minus an inch.
Enid pointed out the Dog Star to John McBride, Junior. "That's where
your daddy is going," she told him. Junior McBride was more interested
in the teething bone that he had clamped between toothless gums, than
he was in the stellar regions.
He knew his daddy would be back.
* * * * *
The _Haywire Queen_ approached and passed the speed of light from the
hard side, and her terrific velocity dropped down to a figure that was
expressible in miles per second without running out of zeroes. Below,
and thirty degrees from the axis of the ship, Sirius and the Dark
Companion beckoned from less than a thousand million miles. The lower
dome of the ship sported the faces of the men, who were laying on their
stomachs, looking down at the splendor of the first binary ever seen
by man. Hammond mentioned it, as a matter of fact.
"How about Drake?" asked McBride.
"We're still the first _men_," returned Hammond.
"Wouldn't Drake howl to hear you say that," laughed McBride. "She's
been suffering under the fact that every time she did anything new,
she had to qualify it by saying: 'The first woman--' Well, she's got
something this time."
"Think it'll satisfy her?"
"Not until someone proves definitely that Thomas Edison, Franklin
Roosevelt, William Shakespeare, George Washington, Richard the First,
Julius Caesar, and Jack Frost were all women."
"Well, let's get the hemis working. We'll never know whether Sirius has
planets until we do. I'd hate to sit in the _Queen_ and go through all
the growing pains of looking for planets by observation."
"Yeah, that would take years. What's our velocity, Larry?"
Timkins looked at the velocimeter; squinted through the instrument
quickly, adjusting the thumb-screw; and then said: "Thirty-four
thousand and dropping at one hundred feet per second, per second, per
second."
"We can get good pix of anything close enough to the primary to support
life--also big enough, too--in about thirty minutes exposure," said
Hammond. "We'll take two shots in each direction, since I've got six
hemispherical cameras. That'll give us complete overlapping coverage
and double protection against dust streaks. Let's go. Also cut the
drive by half."
For thirty minutes the ship plunged on through the Sirian system at the
double deceleration. Then for fifteen minutes, the entire personnel
was in the darkroom, waiting for the first glimmer of the plates.
And at the time that the plates were finished, the velocity of the
_Haywire Queen_ had dropped from thirty thousand-odd miles per second
to velocities normally used in mere interplanetary travel.
The super drive was cut and the ship coasted under standard drive at
thirty feet per second, per second, acceleration, and the men hung
the plates up in the darkroom and began to inspect them for telltale
streaks.
"Here's one," said McBride. "About four hundred million miles from
Sirius."
"And another," offered Larry, plying dividers and log tables, "about
three thousand million."
"Got another," offered Hammond, "but it's doubtful as a possible
landing place. Almost ten thousand million mites from the primary. Bet
it's colder than a pawn-broker's heart."
"Couple more on my plate," said McBride. He went to the formerly empty
solar map and added the discoveries according to scale. "But that one
at four hundred million is my best bet."
"Sounds reasonable," agreed Hammond. "Sirius would support humanoid
life at that distance. Let's concentrate on it."
"Good. It's in fine position to be concentrated on. Let's see, now,
what should we be looking out for?"
"Might be seetee matter," suggested Larry.
"Good. How do we find out?"
"We don't until the last ditch. But it is the most important,
nevertheless. We wait until everything else has been disposed of and
then make for the planet. Just outside of the atmosphere we heave 'em a
rock or two and watch what happens."
"A slow moving rock?" grinned McBride.
"Doesn't really matter. If it is slow enough to keep from
friction-incandescence, fine. But the eruption made by seetee contact
is quite a bit different, spectroscopically. Also we can check the
explosion with counters. The by-products of such a bit of eruption is
full of nuclear radiations. Mere incandescence is just that and nothing
more."
"Well, that's that. We can wait. What's next?"
"Radioactivity. How much and what kind? Atmosphere. How much and what
kind? Et cetera. Also how much and what kind? Do we intend to land?"
"I don't know. After all, we came for the express purpose of trying out
our drive on an interstellar basis, you know. It can be done with ease,
neatness, and dispatch. Seems to me that a landing on one of those
planets will have to be made attractive or we won't. We're equipped
for all kinds of spacial research, power research, and so on. But
we're not equipped for much planetary investigation, exploration, or
diplomatically involved intrigue."
"Going to let Drake get away with being the only person making the
first landing on an alien star system?"
"I don't give a care what happens to Drake. She can come busting in
with the safety valve tied down if she wants to. Some day she'll
learn that sticking that pretty little snoot of hers into strange
places is a fine way to have it knocked right off of the front of her
face. We're interested in technicalities, not in getting involved
in a storybook adventure. Meanwhile, let's take it strictly on the
easy side and investigate everything from the solar radiation from
Sirius to the secondary radiation produced by Sirian radiation in the
super-stratosphere."
* * * * *
Larry began to fiddle with the radio. There was nothing on the
electronic radio at all, and Larry said: "Well, didn't expect it,
really. No culture worthy of the name would be using radio in space.
Too inefficient. And if they got off of their planets, they'd be using
gravitics." He turned to the space radio, and covered the communication
bands of the electrogravitic spectrum, switching from band to band
quickly. Halfway across the third band, the panoramic tuner came to a
definite stop and retraced itself minutely, vacillating a bit until
the signal came in clear and clean.
"What happened to Drake?" asked Timkins. "Listen. Here she is."
The gravitic radio was calling: "--_Haywire Queen_. Calling _Haywire
Queen_. This is Sandra Drake calling the _Haywire Queen_. This is an
automatic transmission set for break-in. As soon as this call gets to
you, answer please. The answer will register here and we will be able
to make this two-way. This is Sandra Drake--"
"Uh-huh," said Hammond, turning down the gain to a reasonable level.
"Larry, shoot her an answer."
Timkins snapped on the transmitter, tuned it to the same band, and
said: "This is the _Haywire Queen_ calling Sandra Drake. _Haywire
Queen_ answering Drake. Come in, Sandra Drake. Answer."
They listened to the automatic broadcast for some minutes, and then in
the middle of a sentence--"This is Sandra Drake calling the _Haywire
Queen_--" _Click._ "Hello, fellows. Got here finally, didn't you? Glad
to have you come in. What's new?"
Hammond took the mike. "Hello, Sandra," he answered. "Nothing new.
Where are you?"
"On planet number five. That is the one that I think is somewhere about
five hundred million miles from Sirius. Know it?"
"We think so. It's dead ahead. Yeah, wait a minute. Larry has a
directional bearing on you and it is the one we're approaching. That
takes care of that."
"Well, come on in and I'll build you a cup of tea."
"You find everything all right?"
"Everything's perfect. Only thing, they would like to have someone here
that knows all about the gravitics. They're not too sharp. Frankly,
neither am I, so you're the guys who'll have to do it."
"You've been there quite a bit," said Hammond. "How's conditions?"
"Pretty good. Air is O.K., though slightly pungent in smell. The people
are very much like humans, though they have their big differences which
take them out of the human class."
"For instance?"
"Well, they are all covered with a funny kind of hair. It's a sort of
half-hair, half-feathers kind of stuff. It's as soft as a baby's scalp
and on a dog or something like that it would be beautiful. I'd like a
coat made of it, frankly."
"I'll bet they appreciate your offer to wear one of 'em for a winter
coat," said Hammond dryly. "You haven't changed a bit, have you, Drake?"
"Oh, I wouldn't say that," said Sandra. "After all, I was merely trying
to explain the beauty of their skin."
"You gave yourself away," said Steve Hammond. "Like as usual, Sandra
Drake thinks of everything in accordance with how it will couple to
her, or her name, or her reputation."
"Now, you're being hard," complained Sandra. "Give me a break, Steve.
You shouldn't take issue with me for a statement of that kind. After
all, it was just a sort of slip of the tongue. I'm not really thinking
of skinning one of them for my coat."
"If I were you," put in McBride, "I'd think hard of one other thing
that might be closer to home. D'jever think that you are in no position
to do any skin collecting? The odds are agin' it. But, Sister Drake,
those birds are! You might enhance the beauty of one of their females
some day. How would the pelt of Sandra Drake look on the living room
floor, nine light-years from Terra? Take it clean and easy, Drake, or
you might not get back to Terra with that satiny, soft, practically
flawless hide of yours intact."
"What do you mean, 'practically flawless'?" snapped Sandra.
"Well," drawled McBride, "I've never seen all of it."
"Why don't you give me the benefit of the doubt?"
"I wouldn't give you any benefit of any doubt," McBride told her.
"You're probably concealing something."
"Why--" the radio broke down into a series of liquid, spluttering
sounds as Sandra strove to keep that throaty contralto from sounding
like a fishmonger's.
"Whistle," chuckled Timkins. "Then count ten. Then let's get back to
the problem of the Sirians."
"Take it, Sandra," laughed Hammond. "We were only kidding you.
Or--can't you take it?"
The spluttering died, and then that throaty laugh came back again. It
was slightly forced and they knew it. The chances are that Sandra knew
they knew it, but she didn't want to give them any more reason for
laughter at her expense. Then she spoke, directly and honestly, both
factors due to the fact that she was sure of herself and now could
afford to laugh at them.
"Well, stop worrying about Sandra's hide," she told them. "This
gang down here are fine people except that they can't talk Terran.
They'll do anything for me that I can make them understand. That's the
trouble--getting them to understand. But that's coming. I'm teaching
them to speak Terran. That should fix things up fine."
"Why not learn to speak Sirian?" asked McBride.
"Why? Let them do the work. Learning a new language is not Drake's idea
of a year's fun."
"O.K., sister," grinned Hammond, winking at McBride. "But you'll find
out that there is something to those old adages. I'm thinking of the
one that begins: 'When in Rome, et cetera.' Those old boys used to dust
off some old saws, but there is a lot of meat on them."
"And contradictions. No, fellows, Sandra doesn't like talking in
something that sounds like a phonograph record played backwards.
Besides, these fellows have a pretty sharp capacity for understanding.
I've been here for a week or so, and already they can understand a lot
of what I say. Frankly, better than I could."
"Play it your way, then," said McBride. "But look, you say they're nice
guys?"
"Sure. When I landed, they gave me the old send-off. I was taken to
the royal house and given the prize suite. I'm given everything, as I
said before. They look upon me as the guy who'll give their world the
benefit of the Terran and Solarian scientific achievements. That's not
true, of course. It'll be fellows like yourselves who really understand
it. But nevertheless, I'm the harbinger of spring. I'm the guy who
pointed the way for the rest of Sol's children."
"The Moses in the bulrushes?"
"Sort of like. I'm just lucky, and I know it. If I'd come second, they
wouldn't pay any attention to me at all. But since I came first and
now that I'm talking to my friends, they will obviously think that
I'm calling for them to come and help them ... their world's name is
Telfu, by the way ... Telfans out of their scientific rut. They have
the glimmerings of the gravitic spectra, but it's like the difference
between the Leyden Jar and the electron microscope. It'd take a hundred
years before they got off of Telfu if we hadn't got here first."
"If they're really O.K.," said McBride, "we'll help."
"Thanks," said Sandra simply. "That'll be for me, too, you know."
"Yes?"
"Sure. They'll thank me for coming first, even though they know I'm not
the bright guy with the answers under my skull. I've got a good thing
here, and I know all of you well enough to know that you won't spoil
it."
"No?"
"Sure you won't. After all, there isn't one of you that would care a
rap for what they have to offer in the way of historic gain. The old
moola, sure; and there's plenty of it to be had for all of us. You'll
go down in their histories as the geniuses that gave them a boot in the
tail worth a hundred years of solid research. I, and I'm sure you'll
permit me, will ride in on the tail of your coat."
"O.K. Well, we'll come in. But not for long this time. After all,
we're interested in tinkering with the new drive, not making diplomatic
overtures to a bunch of aliens. We'll leave the latter for the Solarian
Government."
"How soon'll you be landing?"
"Not too sudden," said Hammond. "We're going to make a few space-checks
first. We're getting cautious in our old age."
"Shucks," said Sandra disparagingly, "there's nothing to it at all."
"Well, could be, but we'll run this show our way. There is no objection
to your leaving?"
"No. Definitely not. They'd be sorry to see me go, but it is personal
affection and the possibility for their ultimate gain that makes it so.
They wouldn't dare detain me even though they might consider it. To my
knowledge, they haven't even considered it."
"Why wouldn't they dare?" asked McBride.
"Afraid. After all, they know that both of us came from a star nine
light-years away. They haven't even got the primary drive, let alone
the third-derivative drive. Any untoward move to a Solarian would bring
the devil himself down about their ears and they know it."
"I suppose so. We could drop plenty of stuff on 'em with a half dozen
space cans. And a couple of monolobar mechano-gravitics would scramble
up the works of any fleet of stratosphere planes they could send
against us. Never gave the gravitic armament much thought, but it could
be done. O.K., Sandra, as soon as we sniff the air and check our gas
and water, we'll be in."
"I'm going back to bed, then," said Sandra. "Slip me another call
before you land and I'll have the village band out to meet you. That's
a promise."
* * * * *
Steve Hammond turned to McBride after Sandra had clicked her
transmitter off, and said: "No use checking for seetee matter, is
there? Seems to me that Drake would have found it out the hard way."
"No, we can skip the seetee. But Drake may not worry about
radioactivity but we will. We'll check for it; I'd like for John Jr.
to have a brother or sister some day--with the proper amount of arms,
legs, fingers, toes, ears, eyes, noses--"
"What's the proper amount of noses for a son?" asked Hammond.
"One," grinned McBride.
"A kid with two noses could smell a lot," observed Timkins.
"_Phew!_" said McBride holding his nose. "That was fierce. Man the
counter and check the region for hot stuff, Larry. Looks like the
landing of LaDrake saves us a lot of work. The physical properties
of ... Telfu ... seem to be all right. So we'll go to work on the
electrical properties, the nuclear properties, and also see if there's
anything running around loose in the gravitics other than the inherent
mechanogravitic property of matter."
Larry Timkins set up a series of plungers on the control board and
locked the pre-set operations into the autopilot. "This," he said,
"will hang us on a logarithmic spiral approaching Telfu. While we're
roaming around the planet, we'll check the hot-properties of the
neighborhood. Any comment?"
"Nope. Give 'em the works."
Timkins drove the coupler button home and the _Haywire Queen_ swung
gently to follow the pre-determined course.
"You know, Steve, there's a cod-liver-oil smell about this, somewhere."
"So? What's fishy?"
"The old tub isn't behaving like a lady."
"What do you mean?"
"There's a big drop in efficiency compared to when we left the
Plutonian Lens."
"How much?"
"Not too much. But it's getting progressively worse."
"Y'don't suppose we've hit upon some saturation factor in the secondary
drive?"
"I'm not saying. What do we know about it? What does it work on?"
"Glibly speaking, it works on the inherent qualities of space. We
wrap ourselves up in a space-warp of sorts, and then shoot out
a couple of hooks that catch on to the gravitic-propagational
continuum that permits the planetary masses to exert Newton's Law of
Universal Gravitation. It has been called 'sub-ether' but that is like
multiplying with unreal numbers. After all, the 'ether' has never been
defined, isolated, explained, or held in one hand. If the prime 'ether'
has never been satisfactorily established, we shouldn't go on building
our houses on a foundation that doesn't have any sound basis."
"Both electronic and gravitic spectra must rely upon something for
propagation," objected McBride. "For lack of taking it apart, brick by
brick, and feeling each stone, let's continue to call them 'ether' and
'sub-ether.'"
"O.K., sport. But to get back to the drive. Have we got a saturation
point? Or some sort of gravitic fatigue? Either of these would be
indicated by a gradual decrease in efficiency."
"Larry, set up a sigma recorder and let's see if we can check the curve
of inefficiency. It's getting worse, you say?"
"Apparently. I didn't notice it before. But it is quite apparent now.
Must be non-linear, because if this falling-off had been linear, I
would have noticed it long before this. An increasing curve would not
be noticeable until a sufficient interval had been passed for it to
become evident. Yeah, I'll slap a sigma recorder on him and see what
makes."
"Meanwhile, let's get busy with the detectors."
The counters clicked for a few minutes, and McBride finally reported
that Telfu was no higher than Terra in radioactivity. Hammond
established the intrinsic electronic charge on Telfu as being only a
few million volts negative with respect to Terra.
"Not enough to worry about," he said. "The first touch with the
stratosphere layers will take care of that without a glimmer. Wouldn't
dare without an atmosphere, but we have plenty of air to cushion the
charge and let it leak off in the upper layers where it is ionized by
Sirius' radiations. What's with the gravitics?"
"Bit of something in the electrogravitic. Can't place it. Not enough to
worry about."
"What is it like?"
"Well, it is not E-grav radiation. It's a sort of dip, or valley, in
the radiation-pattern of this part of space. A place where the normal
density of E-grav is less."
"How much?"
"You tell me. The free-running gravitons are never high enough to do
more than flicker the finest instrument. The threshold is way, way,
way, way down in the mud. So here's a place where we have less."
"Sort of like having nothing and wanting to share it with someone?"
"Not much better. Oh well, a lack of free E-grav energy surely isn't
anything to write home about. Might be a factor of the Sirian Double.
After all, who knows what kind of effect that little, dark-red,
dense-as-hell devil will do to gravitic threshold levels."
"So it's a safe bet--"
Timkins came running in, waving a sheet of cross-ruled paper. "Hell's
bells," he yelled. "We're it! Our drive is approaching zero efficiency
as the third power of--"
* * * * *
Above, in the working innards of the _Haywire Queen_, great circuit
breakers crashed open. Smaller switches added to the din as they
clicked open, one after the other. Pilot lights on the polished black
panel began to glow an angry red and alarm bells created such a din
that speech became almost impossible.
The drive went off.
And the men and their portable equipment left the solid floor and began
to float aimlessly across the room in midair.
Hammond clutched wildly at a spectrograph, and caught it.
"Catch!" he yelled at McBride, hurling the heavy instrument at John.
McBride folded himself over the instrument with a grunt of escaping
breath. The act did two things. It sent Hammond across the room to
the emergency panel in one direction and McBride went in the opposite
direction to the navigator's calculating machine. McBride caught the
navigator's table at the same time that Hammond caught the emergency
panel.
Steve fought with the emergency panel and succeeded in setting up about
eleven feet per second deceleration. McBride lowered the spectrograph
to the table and seated himself in the chair.
"Woah, Nellie," grunted McBride as the alarm bells ceased. "Where do we
go from here and how fast?"
"I dunno, but we're leaving both Sirius and Sol at a terrific velocity
and a deceleration of eleven feet per. From a mental calculation of
the fundamental drive at this velocity, I'd say it would take about
fourteen years to get down to a stop."
"What happened to the emergency relays?"
"They worked," said Steve dryly. "Yeah, they worked. But the
inefficiency extends to the fundamental drive, too, it seems. I'm
beginning to think that this is not inherent."
"That's a quick decision."
"Sure. But the prime drive is O.K. The meters say so. It's just
inefficient as the devil which is not true of a good drive. Holy smoke!
We're getting efficient again!"
Timkins picked himself off of the floor painfully. "Uh-huh," he
grunted. "Also, we're leaving Telfu behind at a fierce rate. Can you
keep that eleven feet prime acceleration for a bit?"
"We're going to."
"I'm going to dash madly upstairs and hang the sigma recorder on again.
Something is slippery here."
"What's our velocity at the present time?" asked McBride.
"Up in the fifteen thousand miles per second," answered Hammond.
"Hm-m-m. Then at what point with respect to Telfu did the drive go
out?"
"About a million and a half miles, roughly."
"A minute and forty seconds from spot to conjunction," mused McBride.
"If, little playmate, we can pet power again after one more minute and
thirty seconds-odd, we'll feel more or less sure that it is Telfu and
not us. Larry!" he yelled. "Any sign of upswing?"
"Yup," said Larry. "Sure thing!"
"Set the super drive up on test power with automatics to turn it on as
soon as the overload point is passed," said McBride. "We won't blow any
fuses with test power."
* * * * *
Hammond hit the test buttons and then settled down to wait. Then the
drive cut in again, and they all slid down in their chairs.