[Note: An astounding chronicle of two Lunarians' conquest of time and
interstellar space.]
The sun had dropped behind the Grimaldi plateau, although for a day
twilight would linger over the Oceanus Procellarum. The sky was a hazy
blue, and out over the deeper tinted waves the full Earth swung. All the
long half-month it had hung there above the horizon, its light dimmed by
the sunshine, growing from a thin crescent to its full disk three times
as broad as that of the sun at setting. Now in the dusk it was a great
silver lamp hanging over Nardos, the Beautiful, the City Built on the
Water. The light glimmered over the tall white towers, over the white
ten-mile-long adamantine bridge running from Nardos to the shore, and
lit up the beach where we were standing, with a brightness that seemed
almost that of day.
"Once more, Garth," I said. "I'll get that trick yet."
The skin of my bare chest still smarted from the blow of his wooden
fencing sword. If it had been the real two-handed Lunarian dueling
sword, with its terrible mass behind a curved razor edge, the blow would
have produced a cut deep into the bone. It was always the same, ever
since Garth and I had fenced as boys with crooked laths. Back to back,
we could beat the whole school, but I never had a chance against him.
Perhaps one time in ten--
"On guard!"
The silvered swords whirled in the Earth-light. I nicked him on one
wrist, and had to duck to escape his wild swing at my head. The wooden
blades were now locked by the hilts above our heads. When he stepped
back to get free, I lunged and twisted his weapon. In a beautiful
parabola, Garth's sword sailed out into the water, and he dropped to the
sand to nurse his right wrist.
"Confound your wrestling, Dunal. If you've broken my arm on the eve of
my flight--"
"It's not even a sprain. Your wrists are weak. And I supposed you've
always been considerate of me? Three broken ribs!"
"For half a cent--"
* * * * *
He was on his feet, and then Kelvar came up and laid her hand on his
shoulder. Until a few minutes before she had been swimming in the surf,
watching us. The Earth-light shimmered over her white skin, still
faintly moist, and blazed out in blue sparkles from the jewels of the
breastplates and trunks she had put on.
When she touched Garth, and he smiled, I wanted to smash in his dark
face and then take the beating I would deserve. Yet, if she preferred
him-- [TN-1]And the two of us had been friends before she was born. I
put out my hand.
"Whatever happens, Garth, we'll still be friends?"
"Whatever happens."
We clasped hands.
"Garth," Kelvar said, "it's getting dark. Show us your ship before you
go."
"All right." He had always been like that--one minute in a black rage,
the next perfectly agreeable. He now led the way up to a cliff hanging
over the sea.
"There," said Garth, "is the _Comet_. Our greatest step in conquering
distance. After I've tried it out, we can go in a year to the end of the
universe. But, for a starter, how about a thousand light-years around
Rigel in six months?" His eyes were afire. Then he calmed down.
"Anything I can show you?"
[Note: Editor's Note: The manuscript, of which a translation is here
presented, was discovered by the rocket-ship expedition to the moon
three years ago. It was found in its box by the last crumbling ruins of
the great bridge mentioned in the narrative. Its final translation is a
tribute at once to the philological skill of the Earth and to the
marvelous dictionary provided by Dunal, the Lunarian. Stars and lunar
localities will be given their traditional Earth names; and measures of
time, weight, and distance have been reduced, in round numbers, to
terrestrial equivalents. Of the space ship described, the _Comet_, no
trace has been found. It must be buried under the rim of one of the
hundreds of nearby Lunar craters--the result, as some astronomers have
long suspected and as Dunal's story verifies, of a great swarm of
meteors striking the unprotected, airless moon.]
* * * * *
I had seen the _Comet_ before, but never so close. With a hull of
shining helio-beryllium--the new light, inactive alloy of a metal and a
gas--the ship was a cylinder about twenty feet long, by fifteen in
diameter, while a pointed nose stretched five feet farther at each end.
Fixed in each point was a telescopic lens, while there were windows
along the sides and at the top--all made, Garth informed us, of another
form of the alloy almost as strong as the opaque variety. Running
half-way out each end were four "fins" which served to apply the power
driving the craft. A light inside showed the interior to be a single
room, ten feet high at the center of its cylindrical ceiling, with a
level floor.
"How do you know this will be the bottom?" I asked, giving the vessel a
shove to roll it over. But it would not budge. Garth laughed.
"Five hundred pounds of mercury and the disintegrators are under that
floor, while out in space I have an auxiliary gravity engine to keep my
feet there."
"You see, since your mathematical friends derived their identical
formulas for gravity and electromagnetism, my job was pretty easy. As
you know, a falling body follows the line of least resistance in a field
of distortion of space caused by mass. I bend space into another such
field by electromagnetic means, and the _Comet_ flies down the track.
Working the mercury disintegrators at full power, I can get an
acceleration of two hundred miles per second, which will build up the
speed at the midpoint of my trip to almost four thousand times that of
light. Then I'll have to start slowing down, but at the average speed
the journey will take only six months or so."
* * * * *
"But can anyone stand that acceleration?" Kelvar asked.
"I've had it on and felt nothing. With a rocket exhaust shoving the
ship, it couldn't be done, but my gravitational field attracts the
occupant of the _Comet_ just as much as the vessel itself."
"You're sure," I interrupted, "that you have enough power to keep up the
acceleration?"
"Easily. There's a two-thirds margin of safety."
"And you haven't considered that it may get harder to push? You know the
increase of mass with velocity. You can't take one-half of the
relativity theory without the other. And they've actually measured the
increase of weight in an electron."
"The electron never knew it; it's all a matter of reference points. I
can't follow the math, but I know that from the electron's standards it
stayed exactly the same weight. Anything else is nonsense."
"Well, there may be a flaw in the reasoning, but as they've worked it
out, nothing can go faster than light. As you approach that velocity,
the mass keeps increasing, and with it the amount of energy required for
a new increase in speed. At the speed of light, the mass would be
infinite, and hence no finite energy could get you any further."
"Maybe so. It won't take long to find out."
A few of the brightest stars had begun to appear. We could just see the
parallelogram of Orion, with red Betelguese at one corner, and across
from it Rigel, scintillant like a blue diamond.
"See," Garth said, pointing at it. "Three months from now, that's where
I'll be. The first man who dared to sail among the stars."
"Only because you don't let anyone else share the glory and the danger."
"Why should I? But you wouldn't go, anyway."
"Will you let me?"