"Couldn't I get my bag?" pleaded Alice.
"Anything of real value in it?" asked Norton.
"Not really."
"Then we'd best leave it." Norton breathed a sigh of relief. Now she
wouldn't find it more expedient to travel with the bunch upstairs.
He led them up a flight of curved stairs and around another curved
corridor as the announcement howled:
"Nine minutes!"
The squawk-box said, in a more natural voice, "Jock? Look, I've got
this section under control. How're you doing?"
"I'm doing fine, Limey. We're almost at the below-station lock."
"Be seein' you. Luck."
The announcement yelled:
"Eight minutes! You all have plenty of time. Remember, safety is more
important that blind speed! Listen!"
The tremolo of an organ filled the spacecraft--vibrant, thrilling,
brilliant music rising over the _throb, throb, throb_ of heavy bass,
beating time just fast enough to keep feet moving briskly, but nowhere
fast enough to cause panic or fumbled steps.
"Seven minutes!" came the cry.
* * * * *
Norton's hands closed on the space lock and he twisted the emergency
handles. The inner door swung open ponderously and they walked past the
portal. The lock swung behind them and the dogs went home.
"Six minutes!" came a less resonant call from a smaller loud-speaker in
the lock.
Jock Norton handed Alice through the small space lock of the lifeship,
boosted Andrews in after her, then climbed in himself.
"Five minutes!" was almost cut off as the lifeship space lock swung
shut.
"Four minutes!" came as the big outer space lock was cracked.
Norton's hands on the lifeship controls moved and the little spacer
leaped out of the doorway.
On the infrawave they heard the call of "Three minutes!" then "Two!"
and finally the announcement, "You are now all debarked and are in
places of safety. The distress call has been sent constantly from
the moment of danger. Sit tight and make no foolish moves until help
comes. Do not look to the rear, as the explosion of a collapsed field
generator is brilliant enough to sear the eyes--"
The voice stopped abruptly as there came a wave of sheer heat. The
ports on the side of the lifeship flared blue-white, and the spacecraft
bucked as though it were being driven into a heavy gas cloud.
"What was that?" blurted Andrews, picking himself up off the heaving
deck.
Norton shrugged. "That was Spaceflight Seventy-nine going to hell in a
wicker basket," he said.
"But why? We weren't hit by anything."
"You can bet not," Norton said cheerfully. "Don't you know about
spaceflight factors? The Einstein equation?"
Andrews eyed the pilot coldly. For several hours the younger man had
been explaining all sorts of things in a condescending manner, showing
off his knowledge in a field that he knew far better than any one else
present. This was galling to the financier, who was used to paying
mathematicians and physicists small change.
"I don't have time to clutter up my mind with equations," he told
Norton coldly. "I usually pay people to have them explain these things
to me. So go right ahead."
Norton's thick hide sloughed off the insult because he was still the
bright one.
He said, "The original Einstein equation of mass and energy shows that
as the speed of light is reached, the mass reaches infinite mass. This
is an obvious impossibility, since even the total mass of the Universe
is not an infinite mass. So when a body traveling at faster-than-light
is hurled into the real Universe by the collapse of the warp-generator,
for the barest instant it is actually traveling beyond light. This
causes it to assume some unknown factor of mass that no physicist has
been able to theorize yet, but must be the impossible infinity-plus.
At any rate, the fabric of space is twisted, as if by a gravitational
field so powerful that the field wraps up around itself and forces the
mass into a Universe of its own."
"You're talking gibberish."
"Sure I am. But you find me someone who can explain this effect without
talking like an imbecile and I'll buy you a good cigar."
"All right--go on. What is supposed to happen?"
Norton shrugged. "If a volume of space is removed from the structure
of space--this is more gibberish, Andrews, believe me--then there must
be an instantaneous flow of space back to fill the gap. Now, for God's
sake don't ask me why empty space has got to flow into a place where
some empty space has been removed. I've always been taught that nothing
from nothing leaves nothing. Maybe nothing from nothing leaves less
nothing than before, but that sounds as silly as the rest of the whole
fool argument. At any rate, every time a warp-generator collapses, the
same twist occurs in the structure of space. There have been billions
of bucks' worth of equipment shot into nothingness by the White Sands
Space Academy in the last hundred years, just to see if someone can
come up with a logical answer."
* * * * *