Seemingly least imaginative of them all, it was odd that Link should be
the first to crack under the strain.
From the time of the disclosure that their hull was slowly corroding
under the chemical action of the clay, he had appeared frightened and
morose. Once or twice, as Marlin approached him on isolated portions of
the superstructure, he slunk away in a peculiar manner. One day--for
they still called their alternation of sleeping and waking periods a
"day"--he failed to show up for meals.
When he did not appear the second day, the group aroused from its
apathetic indifference sufficiently to institute a search.
He was crouching behind some packing boxes in the store room, and fled
with wild shrieks on being discovered.
He managed to hide himself again, and the search was dropped. Some
hours later they discovered him furtively clamboring among the girders
overhead.
From this time on, the girders became his abode. His weasel face,
nearly hidden by the long growth of hair, peered down at them from odd
angles with alert suspicion. He resembled an unkempt monkey clad in
tattered shirt and trousers. If they attempted to approach or tried to
lure him down, he shrieked and chattered at them, and retreated to more
precarious heights, until they desisted, fearful of making him fall.
"Hunger'll bring him down," DuChane said. And it did. During one of the
sleep periods, he raided the store room and created such havoc that Maw
Barstow formed a habit of leaving his ration of food and water on a box
in plain sight.
When all were apparently asleep, he would stealthily slip down and
snatch the food, wolfing it like a wild creature, ready to scamper for
safety at the slightest noise.
Watching from concealment, Marlin saw him do this a couple of times,
but made no effort to trap him.
And for Marlin, there were more important concerns. Isolated from the
rest, he sat for hours at a time before the periscope, trying to arrive
at some theory regarding their position in space.
One thing was established by now. The sphere had developed a lazy
rotation of its own, presenting its two hemispheres alternately to the
sun and giving the surface on which the periscope projected a "day" of
about five hours.
Even without visual observation, the shifting heat areas within the
globe would have led to the same conclusion. The clay-like coating
seemed to have the property of diffusing the sun's rays throughout its
mass. Possibly it would have been burned to a crisp on one side without
such rotation. The side which was receiving the direct rays radiated
a gentle heat through the walls, and this area of radiation traveled
slowly around the circumference.
To Marlin, this rotation seemed to deny the activity of the
anti-gravity plates, yet the maintenance of gravity indicated that at
least they retained some of their function. To account for this seeming
paradox and others, he evolved a set of theories. Some he was able to
verify.
From the first, he had found it difficult to swallow DuChane's surmise
that gravity was maintained within the sphere through some mysterious
reaction from the obverse surfaces of the repulsion plates. To satisfy
his doubts, he wormed his way through a narrow opening between the hull
and girders supporting the superstructure, until he reached the edge of
a segmented bank of repulsion plates.
He found them heavily insulated on the upper side, as if to prevent the
force from exerting its full strength in that direction. By lying in a
cramped position, he was able to extend an arm through a narrow crevice
and to touch the under side of the plates.
* * * * *
His exploring fingers contacted a fragment of some sort--a pebble or
hardened lump of clay. Detaching it from the surface, he fingered it
exploringly. When his fingers relaxed, the lump escaped and instantly
snapped back to the plate, as if held by a taut rubber band. He
recovered the fragment and tried the same thing experimentally, with
the same result.
There was no mistake. Objects released below the anti-gravity plates
dropped toward them, just as did objects released from above. If
anything, the attraction of the underside was stronger. In point of
fact, the supposed anti-gravity plates were gravity plates.
Convinced of something he had vaguely suspected, Marlin retired to his
usual vantage point--the observation scaffold--to think matters out.
He was vaguely disturbed when Sally clambered up the ladder and joined
him.
"You're up to something?" she accused. "Tell Sally what it's all about."
"I'd only bore you."
"What's the difference? I'm bored anyway."
She sat beside him on the edge of the platform, bare feet protruding
from her threadbare slacks. Marlin was quite certain that she wouldn't
resist if he put his arm around her, but he squelched any such impulse.
Too many times he had seen DuChane's arm occupying that position.
"All right," he observed. "You asked for it." He told her what he had
discovered.
"Well," she asked, "what of it?"
"This is the way I'd explain it. I think the criticism of Thornboldt's
principle, advanced by orthodox scientists, was probably justified.
Such an enormous application of energy would be needed to effect the
stress required for anti-gravity polarization, that it was a practical
impossibility. Yet somehow this enormous power was generated for the
brief moment which marked the plunge of our vessel into outer space."
"I think we ought to christen the old ball," she remarked irrelevantly.
"How about calling it what Bart suggested--the Thornboldt?"
"I suppose the inventor is entitled to some credit," Marlin agreed
absently. "But to figure this out: Let's assume a generator or storage
battery capable of delivering current of one ampere strength for a
hundred hours. Suppose it should release the same amount of current
within a single hour. The strength of the current would obviously be
multiplied a hundred times, wouldn't it? Suppose the same current were
released in a single minute. It would be multiplied six thousand times.
Suppose it were released in a second, what would be its strength?"
"I'm no good at figures," replied Sally, fidgeting.
"Thirty-six thousand amperes!" Marlin told her impressively. "That's a
lot of stepping up. Eli claims his batteries are capable of supplying
current for several months, and while I don't know their capacity,
it must be considerable. Suppose most of this potential current was
drained off by the shell of our vessel, acting like a Leyden jar or
accumulator, and then released in one titanic discharge. Don't you see?
This must have accomplished the near-impossible--the polarization of
the repulsion plates, resulting in the anti-gravity reaction."
"You sure deal out jawbreakers when you get started," Sally shrugged.
"All right," he went on imperturbably. "The intense discharge probably
lasted only a moment--but that was sufficient. It shot our sphere away
from the earth as if it had been fired from a cannon--sent it with an
initial momentum which took us far beyond Earth's attraction and must
still be continuing undiminished in the vacuum of space."
Sally yawned and rose. "What you need is a classroom," she said. "I'll
pass the word along in case any of the rest feel the need of brushing
up on their education."
* * * * *
Her departure scarcely disturbed Marlin's train of thought. His
theory, of course, gave birth to other perplexing problems. How account
for the fact that neither sphere nor passengers were crushed by the
enormous acceleration?
He had an answer for that one.
Logically, he reasoned, they owed their salvation to the fact that
they, too, were subject to the momentary repulsion of the activated
plates. Repulsion hurled them violently away--acceleration pressed them
back. The two forces practically cancelled out. Possibly the insulation
on the upper surfaces of the plates gave acceleration a slight edge,
causing the crushing sensation Marlin had felt at the onset of their
flight.
But the anti-gravity force was no longer in effect--probably had lasted
not more than a few seconds. What had caused the plates to become
imbued with an opposite force--an attractive force akin to gravity?
To answer this, Marlin found himself seeking analogies in the realm of
electrical phenomena.
A magnet, he reflected, is a bar of iron in which the movements of the
molecules are so organized as to keep the lines of their magnetic axis
parallel--all the molecular north poles pointing toward the same end
of the bar. It is accomplished by placing the bar in a larger magnetic
field, and it is made permanent by tempering--which fixes the molecules
in permanent alignment.
Thornboldt's atomic polarization principle must be similar. Under
terrific stress, the molecules of the repulsion plates, and their
constituent atoms, were polarized in such a way that they exercised the
force of repulsion. But when the stress was released, there would be
no tempering to maintain the molecular set. They would--in a manner of
speaking--snap back, like rubber bands released from tension, not quite
to their original condition, but to a condition tending toward the
opposite of that occasioned by the stress.
The attractive property now inherent in the plates, in other words, was
a reaction from the terrific stress of their momentary anti-gravity
polarization.
It was notable that there had been no interruption of the electrical
power which supplied current for cooking and waste incineration,
operated the air-purifying apparatus and refrigeration plant, and kept
their lighting system in force. Evidently, Marlin decided, the storage
batteries--if they had been drained of their charges prior to the
impulse which hurled them into space--must have recovered, as batteries
do when given a rest. He inclined also to the opinion that the sphere
itself generated electricity through the expansion and contraction of
the outer coating as it slowly revolved.
* * * * *
Sally appeared to avoid him after this encounter--or so Marlin
imagined. He had a notion that she had been piqued by DuChane's pursuit
of Norma, and wanted to show the man a thing or two by giving Marlin
an opportunity to make love to her. His failure to rise to the bait had
not endeared him to her.
He told himself that he did not care--but, in truth, he felt his
isolation. It was comforting even to have Pearl creep up to the
periscope ledge beside him, as she did at rare intervals. He fell into
the habit of talking to her, as a relief from the close-mouthed silence
that had grown upon him. It was better, at any rate, than talking to
himself, and helped him to orient his ideas.
"Sometimes, Pearl," he confided, "I have a feeling that you sense
what I'm trying to say better than I understand it myself. It's
cockeyed--but a fellow develops queer fancies in a weird situation like
this."
She smiled amiably.
"I even find myself assuming that you know what's behind all this. I
suppose it's your air of calm assurance--or the lucky way you seemed
to hit things back there on Earth. And here I go, with another screwy
idea--that there is something behind it all."
He applied his eye to the periscope. It was on the night side, and only
an impenetrable expanse of blackness, studded with bright, unblinking
points of light, rewarded his gaze. Relaxing, he faced the girl.
"Reason tells me that we're the victims of a freakish accident. Yet I
find myself assuming--"
He checked the sentence, glancing around self-consciously for possible
eavesdroppers. With a dreamy expression Pearl was looking at--or beyond
him.
"It's a comfort to talk to you," he confessed. "You make it easier to
express the inexpressible. What was I saying? Oh, yes."
He frowned. "I get to fancying sometimes that the crew of us were
brought together, herded into this incredible monstrosity, and then
spewed forth in accordance with some age-old plan. It's almost as if
the little world we're in had a life of its own and had been sent forth
with the blessings of the parent Earth to work out its own destiny.
What do you think, Pearl? In your infinite wisdom--or simplicity--tell
me. At least it _could_ be true."
The girl's lips parted. "It could be true," she echoed.
He shrugged. Often you could get a response from her by making an
emphatic effort, but it was usually like this--some amiable repetition
of the words you put in her mouth.
"All right," he retorted, as if she had contradicted him, "say that
I'm screwy! But tell me--what do we know about other possible states
of consciousness? We think we understand human consciousness--because
we're experiencing it. We credit animals with consciousness because
they act in a limited way like humans. But how do we know there aren't
other phases of consciousness? How do we know that a tree isn't a
conscious entity, or a rock, or this globe--or the Earth? How do we
know?"
"How do we know?" parroted the girl. She smiled up at his tense
features, as if trying to please him. Beyond her, in the shadowy
obscurity of the girders, he caught a glimpse of Link's monkey-like
face peering furtively down at them.
He broke off abruptly. "You're a bad influence, Pearl. You encourage
a fellow to voice crazy ideas. First thing I know, I'll be swinging
around on girders myself."