Garrity said cajolingly, "Look, lad--mayhap you don't understand the
difficulties we're in? Suppose you be a good chap an' let the Skipper
take the controls--?"
Lancelot Biggs said, "Just be patient. I would like to explain, but I
think I'd better not! Not yet--at any rate."
Cap looked at me. I put in my two cents' worth.
"Mr. Biggs," I said, "you can read those charts on the wall. Don't you
see we're being carried hundreds of thousands of miles off course? This
vacuole is traveling way over to the right of our course, hitting an
abnormal rate of speed--and we're imbedded in it like a fly in amber.
We've already lost the race; pretty soon we'll lose our--" I stopped,
not wanting to say "lives" in front of Diane.
Lancelot looked at me somberly.
"I should have thought, Sparks," he told me, "that _you_ would
understand. With your education and training--" But he seemed
undecided. He stared at Diane. "Diane--you believe in me, don't you?"
Boy, I'll tell you that gal has what it takes. A long moment passed,
during which Diane looked squarely into Lancelot Biggs' eyes. What she
found there, only she could tell you. But, "Yes, Lancelot," she said.
"I trust you."
His shoulders stiffened, then, just the slightest bit. And a faint
smile gathered at the corners of his lips. He said, "That's all I
wanted to hear. Very well, gentlemen, be patient for just ten more
hours...."
* * * * *
By far the worst feature of being caught in a vacuole is the fact
that you're completely isolated from the rest of the universe. These
super-spatial areas; these dead spots of hyper-emptiness, do not obey
the common laws of space mechanics. There's no radio transmission
through a vacuole; the only laws that seem to apply are the laws of
motion and relativity.
This time, even the relativist principles seemed to go haywire.
Lancelot Biggs had demanded that we be patient for ten hours--but to me
those ten hours seemed like ten centuries. Millennia, maybe. Seconds
crawled. Minutes dragged. Hours were fabulous periods of time. You
could almost sit still and feel your hair graying on your scalp.
I tried to read a book, and gave it up as a bad job after I discovered
I'd re-read the same page six times. Then I fiddled with my dials, but
all I could get out of them was a strange, singing, unearthly hum. I
had a feeling of boding suspense, as though I were an insensate beast
caged in an elevator that was rising through darkness to an unguessed
destination.
Boy, am I getting poetic! Anyhow, that's how I felt, and if you want
to make something of it, stop down by the IPS spaceport at Long Island
and ask for Bert Donovan!
I managed to while away a couple of hours figuring out where the
_Slipstream_ was by this time. Like I said, she was a five-day
freighter. But she'd lost almost a full day in her tangle with the
vacuole--_our_ vacuole--and in spite of the fact that she'd now put on
every bit of juice she had, she wouldn't make the trip in much less
than five and a half days.
Which, of course, didn't help us any. The _Saturn_ was normally a
ten-day ship. Now, caught in the vacuole, it was a question of when, if
ever, we got back onto our trajectory.
What puzzled me most was the fact that in the past I'd come to look
upon Lancelot Biggs as something of a genius; the kind of guy who could
pull rabbits out of a hat. Like the time he rescued our ship from Runt
Hake and his pirate crew.[3] But now Biggs seemed to have gone into a
complete funk; a wan and stubborn silence as to his reasons for having
given up the battle.
[Footnote 3: Fantastic Adventures, February, 1940.--Ed.]
Well, it was his business; not mine. He'd buttered his bread--now let
him lie in it! I looked at the clock once more. Nine hours had elapsed;
a little more than that. So I sauntered back to the bridge.
Everyone up there was in a fine state of the jitters--except Mr. Biggs
and Diane. With fine disregard for those about them, they were curled
up together on a chart-table reading poetry! Cap Hanson had gnawed his
fingernails down to the second knuckle. Dick Todd was pacing the floor
like a captive wild-cat. I said, meekly enough, "Mr. Biggs--the ten
hours is almost up."
"Mmmm!" said Lancelot Biggs.
Cap Hanson turned on him savagely. "Well! Well, do something! And you,
Diane, I'm ashamed of you! Sitting here with that--that nincompoop's
head draped all over your shoulder!"
Diane rose, smiling pertly. "All right, so I'm untidy. Well--show them,
Lancelot!"
Biggs rose. He looked carefully at the clock; then at the statometer.
He moved to the intercommunicating system, gargled a word to the engine
room below. "Mr. Garrity, would you be kind enough to revolve the ship?"
Hanson yelled, "Re--revolve the--Hey! Grab him, somebody! He's gone
space-batty! He's slipped his gravs!"
From below there came the sound of the rotors going into operation.
We couldn't feel anything, of course. The ship's artificial gravs
hold you firm to the floor no matter which is top or bottom in space.
There being no such thing. After a minute Biggs said, "Thank you, Mr.
Garrity. Now, if you will be kind enough to reverse gravs and throw out
the top-deck repulsion beams?"
Garrity obeyed. There came a sudden shock; everything movable in the
room moved. Including me. I fell to the middle of the room, hung there
gaping, weightless, the same as everyone else. The _Saturn_ lurched and
shuddered; it felt as if something trembled along her beams for a brief
instant.
Then, suddenly, we were literally scorching through space again! _Real_
space--not that phoney hyper-stuff of the vacuole. Biggs yelled,
"Normal gravs, Garrity! Alter course to point-six-one for three
minutes, then land...."
Cap Hanson screamed, "What the--what's going on here? Land? What do you
mean--_land_!"
And Lancelot Biggs said, "If you'll be kind enough to look through the
_perilens_, Captain...."
It was Earth. Just as big as life and three times as natural. A
hop-skip-and-jump beneath us. We had made the Venus-to-Earth shuttle in
four days, eight hours!
* * * * *
Afterward, when the Government committee had left, congratulating us
upon having won the allotment, and the IPS officials had departed like
a trio of overgrown sunbeams on legs, Hanson, Todd, Diane, Biggs and I
were alone in the control turret of the _Saturn_.
To the smiling First Mate, Cap Hanson said, "Biggs, this business
of apologizin' to you after every crackpot adventure is gettin'
monotonous. But I do it again--with the provision that you tell me how
the hell an' what the hell happened."
Biggs fidgeted and looked uncomfortable.
"Well, to begin with, I knew we were licked if we tried to race the
_Slipstream_ in any normal fashion--"
"The proper word," I interjected, "is skunked."
"Yes. So when I saw what happened to the _Slipstream_ when it fell into
the vacuole, I saw a way in which we might possibly come out on top.
I didn't want to explain, though, for if the method failed, Captain
Hanson might be reprimanded for permitting the trial--"
"Method?" demanded Hanson. "What method?"
"Piggy-back!" grinned Biggs. "You'll remember that we commented on the
amazing speed with which the vacuole was traveling through space. A
speed greater than our own; even greater than that of the _Slipstream_.
"I purposely plunged the _Saturn_ into the vacuole. The _Slipstream_,
caught in that same sphere of hyper-space, made the mistake of
back-dragging free. I let the vacuole carry us to Earth. It's as simple
as that!"
Hanson said dazedly, "Simple? Which? The method or me? You done so
many funny things--for instance, we got out of the vacuole without
back-draggin'. How?"
"Oh, that! Well, that was just a little thing I figured out while we
were waiting. It seemed stupid to waste fuel back-dragging from a
pocket in space. After all, the easiest way out of a pocket is to let
yourself be _dumped_ out. I just reversed the gravitational plates, let
Earth, which I had reckoned mathematically to be 'above' us, attract us
out of the pocket.
"Since there is neither 'up' nor 'down' in space, we merely fell out of
the vacuole pocket!"
"It penetrates," said Cap Hanson admiringly. "Yep, it finally
penetrates. Well, boys?"
He glanced at us significantly. I knew what he was thinking. Diane and
Biggs were showing unmistakable signs of wanting to be alone. But there
was one more thing--
"Look, Mr. Biggs," I said. "Your explanation is all right, but it
doesn't clear up the matter of _direction_! The vacuole wasn't
traveling on the line of our Venus-Earth trajectory at all. It was
shifting to starboard by fifteen points, which is why we were able to
intersect it. How come--"
Lancelot Biggs looked faintly surprised.
"Why, Sparks, didn't you guess? That was the thing that made our
amazing speed possible. To us, traveling our ten-day route, it _looked_
as if the vacuole were moving to the right of Earth. Actually it was
moving directly toward the spot where Earth would be in ten more
hours. It was, in a way of speaking, an express-train racing along a
short-cut. We hopped the train, and--here we are!"
There was a tiny cough from somewhere under the shelter of his arm. A
soft voice said, "Sparks--"
"Yes, Miss Diane?"
"Sparks--would you mind closing the door on the way out, please?" asked
Diane Hanson.
So I did. I can take a hint as well as the next guy....