"Great Scott! Look at Sol!"
The already-tiny sun was dwindling visibly; it took less than three
or four seconds for Sol's disk to diminish from visible to complete
ambiguity against the curtain of the stars.
"We're in!" exploded Barden.
"Hey!" screamed a watcher at the side port. A flare whisked by,
illuminating the scene like a photo-flash bulb. A second sun, passed at
planetary distance. It joined the starry background behind.
Barden shut off the drive and the tense feeling stopped.
"Well, we're in!" he said in elation. "We're in!"
The scanning room went wild. They gave voice to their feelings in a
yell of sheer exuberance and then started pounding one another on the
back. Barden chinned himself on a cross-brace and then grabbed Edith
Ward about the waist and danced her in a whirling step across the
floor. The crew caught up with them; separating them. They piled into
Barden, ruffling his hair and rough-housing him until he went off his
feet, after which someone produced a blanket and tossed him until the
blanket ripped across. Then they carried him to the desk and set him
unceremoniously across it, face down, and left him there to catch his
breath.
"Like New Year's Eve," he grunted.
The crowd opened to let Edith through. She came toward the desk as Tom
unraveled himself and sat on the top. "A fine bunch of wolves," she
chuckled gleefully. "Tom, have you ever been kissed by twenty-two men?"
"Wouldn't care for it," he said. "They're not my type. And besides,
it's twenty-three." He made the correction himself.
Then things calmed down. They were--as one man put it--"a long way from
home!"
"But what I want to know is why we can see the sun when we're going
away from it at several times the velocity of light?" demanded Tom.
"Well, your own problem answers your own question," said Edith, patting
her hair back into place. "Remember the square-wave problem? Well, in
the transition-period, you are simultaneously obtaining all degrees
from maximum negative to maximum positive including zero. Zero is
where the ship, being out of space-warp, must drop below the speed of
light. The sun receding is due to the persistence of vision that lasts
between transition periods. Lord only knows how far we travel between
each transition."
"We can find out," said Tom. "I'd hoped to develop a velocimeter by
using the doppler effect, but that's not possible, I guess. I'd suggest
that we find out where we are and then head back for Sol. Might as well
get for home and start the real thing cooking."
"What was that sun we passed?"
"I'll not tell you now," said Tom. "One of the nearby stars but I don't
know which. We might stop, though, and take a closer look at an alien
star from close up."
* * * * *
The ship was turned and the drive was applied until the star expanded
into a true sun. At about a billion miles, they stopped to inspect it
sketchily. They were not equipped to make any careful observations of
stellar data.
They watched it like sightseers viewing Niagara Falls for an hour.
There was really nothing to see that could not be taken in at a glance,
but the idea of being near to one of the extrasolar systems was
gratifying in itself.
Then, as the realization that they could watch that silently blazing
star for years without producing anything of interest or value, Barden
called a halt to the self-hypnosis and they resumed their stations.
The drive was applied again, and they passed the star, picking up speed
as they went.
Somewhere ahead was Sol, lost in the starry curtain of the sky. But
they were not lost, for they were headed in roughly the right direction
and eventually Sol would emerge and stand out before them in plenty of
time to correct their course.
The entire group, their period of strain over, stood idly looking out
of the ports. There was nothing to see save that star, passing into
the background. But their work was finished and they were loafing. It
looked like an excellent time to just stand and do nothing. Barden was
inspecting the superdrive unit with a paternal smile, noting with some
gratification that it was even smaller than the normal driving gear of
the ship. Dr. Edith Ward had gone to her room to repair the damage done
during the celebration. Jerry Brandt, the manual pilot, was sitting
idly, playing a senseless game with the myriad of switches on his
disconnected board as the autopilot controlled the ship.
Two of the crew were matching pennies in front of the meter panel, and
three more were watching a chess game between two of the others who
were using various-shaped radio tubes as men. All was set for a quiet
journey home.
Their first alien sun dwindled and was soon lost. Before them, the
stars were immobile until one at near center swelled visibly. Jerry
Brandt idly kicked his switches into neutral and switched over to
manual drive long enough to correct the course; the swelling star
and the rest of the sky swiveled about the ship until Sol was on the
cross-hairs.
This time there were no days of flight from Terra to beyond-Pluto.
Their ship plunged sunward at a dangerous pace, dropping below the
speed of light at the tick of an instant at about the orbit of
Jupiter. At under the speed of light but far above the normal speeds
of spacecraft, the ship headed Terraward, and slowed as it went. The
superdrive was turned off a few thousand miles above Terra and the rest
of the voyage to the surface of the planet took actually longer than
the quick run across interstellar space.
They landed in the huge construction yard at the Barden Laboratories.