* * * * *
Exactly on schedule, fourteen days and some hours after we had started
off, we passed Pi Orionis. For long there had been no doubt in my mind
that, whatever the explanation, our acceleration was holding steady. In
the last few hours the star swept up to the brilliance of the sun, then
faded again until it was no brighter than Venus. Venus! Our sun itself
had been a mere dot in the rear telescope until the change in our course
threw it out of the field of vision.
At sixty-five light-years, twenty-three days out, Beta Eridani was
almost directly in our path for Rigel. Slightly less than a third of the
distance to the midpoint, in over half the time. But our speed was still
increasing 200 miles a second every second, almost four times the speed
of light in an hour. Our watches went on with a not altogether
disagreeable monotony.
There was no star to mark the middle of our journey. Only, toward the
close of one of my watches, a blue light which I had never noticed came
on beside the indicator dials, and I saw that we had covered 233
light-years, half the estimated distance to Rigel. The speed marker
indicated 3975 times the speed of light. I wakened Garth.
"You could have done it yourself," he complained, sleepily, "but I
suppose it's just as well."
He went over to the board and started warming up the rear gravity
projector.
"We'll turn one off as the other goes on. Each take one control, and go
a notch at a time." He began counting, "One, two, three ..."
On the twentieth count, my dial was down to zero, his up to maximum
deceleration, and I pulled out my switch. Garth snapped sideways a lever
on the indicators. Though nothing seemed to happen, I knew that the
speed dial would creep backward, and the distance dial progress at a
slower and slower rate. While I was trying to see the motion, Garth had
gone back to bed. I turned again to the glass and looked out at Rigel,
on the cross hairs, and Kappa Orionis, over to the left, and the great
nebula reaching over a quarter of the view with its faint gaseous
streamers.
* * * * *
And so we swept on through space, with Rigel a great blue glory ahead,
and new stars, invisible at greater distances, flaring up in front of us
and then fading into the background as we passed. For a long time we had
been able to see that Rigel, as inferred from spectroscopic evidence,
was a double star--a fainter, greener blue companion revolving with it
around their common center of gravity. Beyond Kappa Orionis, three
hundred light-years from the sun, the space between the two was quite
evident. Beyond four hundred light-years, the brilliance of the vast
star was so great that it dimmed all the other stars by comparison, and
made the nebula seem a mere faint gauze. And yet even with this gradual
change, our arrival was a surprise.
When he relieved me at my watch, Garth seemed dissatisfied with our
progress. "It must be farther than they've figured. I'll stick at
twenty-five times light speed, and slow down after we get there by
taking an orbit."
"I'd have said it was nearer than the estimate," I tried to argue, but
was too sleepy to remember my reasons. Propped up on one elbow, I looked
around and out at the stars. There was a bright splash of light, I
noticed, where the telescope concentrated the radiation of Rigel at one
spot on the screen. I slept, and then Garth was shouting in my ear:
"We're there!"