From the outside, it was difficult to detect the exact outline of the ship, for the clear lux metal was practically invisible and the foot of it that surrounded the more visible part of the ship gave a curious optical illusion. The perfect reflecting ability of the relux made the inner hull difficult to see, too. It was more by absence than presence that one detected it; it blotted out things behind it.
The great window of the pilot room disclosed the pilot seats and the great switchboard to one side. Each of the windows was equipped with a relux shield that slid into position at the touch of a switch, and these were already in place over the observatory window, so only the long, narrow portholes showed the lighted interior.
For some minutes, the elder men stood looking at the graceful beauty of the ship.
"Come on in-see the inside,” suggested Fuller.
They entered through the airlock close to the base of the ship. The heavy lux door was opened by automatic machinery from the inside, but the combination depended on the use of a molecular ray and the knowledge of the correct place, which made it impossible for anyone to open it unless they had the ray and knew where to use it.
From the airlock, they went directly to the power room. Here they heard the soft purring of a large oscillator tube and the indistinguishable murmur of smoothly running AC generators powered large contraterrene reactors.
The elder Arcot glanced in surprise at the heavy-duty ammeter in a control panel.
"Half a billion amperes! Good Lord! Where is all that power going?” He looked at his son.
"Into the storage coils. It's going in at ten kilovolts, so that's a five billion kilowatt supply. It's been going for half an hour and has half an hour to’ run. It takes two tons of matter to charge the coil to capacity, and we're carrying twenty tons of fuel-enough for ten charges. We shouldn't need more than three tons if all goes well, but ‘all’ seldom does.
"See that large black cylinder up there?” Arcot asked, pointing.
Above them, lying along the roof of the power room, lay a great black cylinder nearly two feet in diameter and extending out through the wall in the rear. It was made integral with two giant lux metal beams that reached to the bow of the ship in a long, sweeping curve. From one of the power switchboards, two heavy cables ran up to the giant cylinder.
"That's the main horizontal power unit. We can develop an acceleration of ten gravities either forward or backward. In the curve of the ship, on top, sides, and bottom, there are power units for motion in the other two directions.
"Most of the rest of the stuff in this section is old hat to you, though. Come on into the next room."
Arcot opened the heavy relux door, leading the way into the next room, which was twice the size of the power room. The center of the floor was occupied by a heavy pedestal of lux metal upon which was a huge, relux-encased, double torus storage coil. There was a large switchboard at the opposite end, while around the room, in ordered groups, stood the familiar double coils, each five feet in diameter. The space within them was already darkening.
"Well,” said Arcot, senior, “that's some battery of power coils, considering the amount of energy one can: store. But what's the big one for?"
"That's the main space control,” the younger Arcot answered. “While our power is stored in the smaller ones, we can shoot it into this one, which, you will notice, is constructed slightly differently. Instead of holding the field within it, completely enclosed, the big one will affect all the space about it. We will then be enclosed in what might be called a hyperspace of our own making."
"I see,” said his father. “You go into hyperspace and move at any speed you please. But how will you see where you're going?"
"We won't, as far as I know. I don't expect to see a thing while we're in that hyperspace. We'll simply aim the ship in the direction we want to go and then go into hyperspace. The only thing we have to avoid is stars; their gravitational fields would drain the energy out of the apparatus and we'd end up in the center of a white-hot star. Meteors and such, we don't have to worry about; their fields aren't strong enough to drain the coils, and since we won't be in normal space, we can't hit them."
The elder Morey looked worried. “If you can't see your way back you'll get lost! And you can't radio back for help."
"Worse that that!” said Arcot. “We couldn't receive a signal of any kind after we get more than three hundred light years away; there weren't any radios before that.
"What we'll do is locate ourselves through the sun's light. We'll take photographs every so often and orient ourselves by them when we come back."
"That sounds like an excellent method of stellar navigation,” agreed Morey senior. “Let's see the rest of the ship.” He turned and walked toward the farther door.
The next room was the laboratory. On one side of the room was a complete physics lab and on the other was a well-stocked and well-equipped chemistry lab. They could perform many experiments here that no man had been able to perform due to lack of power. In this ship they had more generating facilities than all the power stations of Earth combined!
Arcot opened the right door. “This next room is the physics and chemistry storeroom. Here we have a duplicate-in some cases, six or seven duplicates-of every piece of apparatus on board, and plenty of material to make more. Actually, we have enough equipment to make a new ship out of what we have here. It would be a good deal smaller, but it would work.
"The greater part of our materials is stored in the curvature of the ship, where it will be easy to get at if necessary. All our water and food is there, and the emergency oxygen tanks.
"Now let's take the stairway to the upper deck."
The upper deck was the main living quarters. There were several small rooms on each side of the corridor down the center; at the extreme nose was the control room, and at the extreme stern was the observatory. The observatory was equipped with a small but exceedingly powerful telectroscope, developed from those the Nigrans had left on one of the deserted planets Sol had captured in return for the loss of Pluto to the Black Star. The arc commanded by the instrument was not great, but it was easy to turn the ship about, and most of their observations could be made without trouble.
Each of the men had a room of his own; there was a small galley and a library equipped with all the books the four men could think of as being useful. The books and all other equipment were clamped in place to keep them from flying around loose when the ship accelerated.
The control room at the nose was surrounded by a hemisphere of transparent lux metal which enabled them to see in every direction except directly behind, and even that blind spot could be covered by stationing a man in the observatory.
There were heat projectors and molecular ray projectors, each operated from the control room in the nose. To complete the armament, there were more projectors in the stern, controlled from the observatory, and a set on either side controlled from the library and the galley.
The ship was provisioned for two years-two years without stops. With the possibility of stopping on other planets, the four men could exist indefinitely in the ship.
After the two older men had been shown all through the intergalactic vessel, the elder Arcot turned to his old friend. “Morey, it looks as if it was time for us to leave the Ancient Mariner to her pilots."
"I guess you're right. Well-I'll just say goodbye-but you all know there's a lot more I could say.” Morey senior looked at them and started toward the airlock.
"Goodbye, son,” said the elder Arcot. “Goodbye, men. I'll be expecting you any time within two years. We can have no warning, I suppose; your ship will outrace the radio beam. Goodbye.” Dr. Arcot joined his old friend and they went outside.
The heavy lux metal door slid into place behind them, and the thick plastic cushions sealed the entrance to the airlock.
The workmen and the other personnel around the ship cleared the area and stood well back from the great hull. The two older men waved to the men inside th
e ship.
Suddenly the ship trembled, and rose toward the sky.
CHAPTER V
Arcot, at the controls of the Ancient Mariner, increased the acceleration as the ship speared up toward interplanetary space. Soon, the deep blue of the sky had given way to an intense violet, and this faded to the utter black of space as the ship drew away from the planet that was its home.
"That lump of dust there is going to look mighty little when we get back,” said Wade softly.
"But,” Arcot reminded him, “that little lump of dust is going to pull us across a distance that our imaginations can't conceive of. And we'll be darned happy to see that pale globe swinging in space when we get back-provided, of course, that we do get back."
The ship was straining forward now under the pull of its molecular motion power units, accelerating at a steady rate, rapidly increasing the distance between the ship and Earth.
The cosmic ray power generators were still charging the coils, preventing the use of the space strain drive. Indeed, it would be a good many hours before they would be far enough from the sun to throw the ship into hyperspace.
In the meantime, Morey was methodically checking every control as Arcot called out the readings on the control panel. Everything was working to perfection. Their every calculation had checked out in practice so far. But the real test was yet to come.
They were well beyond the orbit of Pluto when they decided they would be safe in using the space strain drive and throwing the ship into hyperspace.
Morey was in the hyperspace control room, watching the instruments there. They were ready!
"Hold on!” called Arcot. “Here we go-if at all!” He reached out to the control panel before him and touched the green switch that controlled the molecular motion machines. The big power tubes cut off, and their acceleration ceased. His fingers pushed a brilliant red switch-there was a dull, muffled thud as a huge relay snapped shut.
Suddenly, a strange tingling feeling of power ran through them-space around them was suddenly black. The lights dimmed for an instant as the titanic current that flowed through the gigantic conductors set up a terrific magnetic field, reacting with the absorption plates. The power seemed to climb rapidly to a maximum-then, quite suddenly, it was gone.
The ship was quiet. No one spoke. The meters, which had flashed over to their limits, had dropped back to zero once more, except those which indicated the power stored in the giant coil. The stars that had shone brilliantly around them in a myriad of colors were gone. The space around them glowed strangely, and there was a vast cloud of strange, violet or pale green stars before them. Directly ahead was one green star that glowed big and brilliant, then it faded rapidly and shrank to a tiny dot-a distant star. There was a strange tenseness about the men; they seemed held in an odd, compelled silence.
Arcot reached forward again. “Cutting off power, Morey!” The red tumbler snapped back. Again space seemed to be charged with a vast surplus of energy that rushed in from all around, coursing through their bodies, producing a tingling feeling. Then space rocked in a gray cloud about them; the stars leaped out at them in blazing glory again.
"Well, it worked once!” breathed Arcot with a sigh of relief. “Lord, I made some errors in calculation, though! I hope I didn't make any more! Morey-how was it? I only used one-sixteenth power."
"Well, don't use any more, then,” said Morey. “We sure traveled! The things worked perfectly. By the way, it's a good thing we had all the relays magnetically shielded; the magnetic field down here was so strong that my pocket kit tried to start running circles around it.
"According to’ your magnetic drag meter, the conductors were carrying over fifty billion amperes. The small coils worked perfectly. They're charged again; the power went back into them from the big coil with only a five percent loss of power-about twenty thousand megawatts."
"Hey, Arcot,” Wade said. “I thought you said we wouldn't be able to see the stars."
Arcot spread his hands. “I did say that, and all my apologies for it. But we're not seeing them by light. The stars all have projections-shadows-in this space because of their intense gravitational fields. There are probably slight fluctuations in the field, perhaps one every minute or so. Since we were approaching them at twenty thousand times the speed of light, the Doppler effect gives us what looks like violet light.
"We saw the stars in front of us as violet points. The green ones were actually behind us, and the green light was tremendously reduced in frequency. It certainly can't be anything less than gamma rays and probably even of greater frequency.
"Did you notice there were no stars off to the side? We weren't approaching them, so they didn't give either effect."
"How did you know which was which?” asked Fuller skeptically.
"Did you see that green star directly ahead of us?” Arcot asked. “The one that dwindled so rapidly? That could only have been the sun, since the sun was the only star close enough to show up as a disc. Since it was green and I knew it was behind us, I decided that all the green ones were behind us. It isn't proof, but it's a good indication."
"You win, as usual,” admitted Fuller.
"Well, where are we?” asked Wade. “I think that's more important."
"I haven't the least idea,” confessed Arcot. “Let's see if we can find out. I've got the robot pilot on, so we can leave the ship to itself. Let's take a look at Old Sol from a distance that no man ever reached before!"
They started for the observatory. Morey joined them and Arcot put the view of Sol and his family on the telectro-scope screen. He increased the magnification to maximum, and the four men looked eagerly at the system. The sun glowed brilliantly, and the planets showed plainly.
"Now, if we wanted to take the trouble, we could calculate when the planets were in that position and determine the distance we have come. However, I notice that Pluto is still in place, so that means we are seeing the Solar System as it was before the passing of the Black Star. We're at least two light years away."
"More than that,” said Morey. He pointed at the screen. “See here, how Mars is placed in relation to Venus and Earth? The planets were in that configuration seven years ago. We're seven light years from Earth."
"Good enough!” Arcot grinned. “That means we're within two light years of Sirius, since we were headed in that direction. Let's turn the ship so we can take a look at it with the telectroscope."
Since the power had been cut off, the ship was in free fall, and the men were weightless. Arcot didn't try to walk toward the control room; he simply pushed against the wall with his feet and made a long, slow dive for his destination.
The others reached for the handgrips in the walls while Arcot swung the ship gently around so that its stern was pointed toward Sirius. Because of its brilliance and relative proximity to Sol, Sirius is the brightest star in the heavens, as seen from Earth. At this much lesser distance, it shone as a brilliant point of light that blazed wonderfully. They turned the telectroscope toward it, but there was little they could see that was not visible from the big observatory on the Moon.
"I think we may as well go nearer,” suggested Morey, “and see what we find on close range observation. Meanwhile, turn the ship back around and I'll take some pictures of the sun and its surrounding star field from this distance. Our only way of getting back is going to be this series of pictures, so I think we had best make it complete. For the first light century, we ought to take a picture every ten light years, and after that one each light century until we reach a point where we are only getting diminishing pictures of the local star cluster. After that, we can wait until we reach the edge of the Galaxy."
"Sounds all right to me,” agreed Arcot. “After all, you're the astronomer, I'm not. To tell you the truth, I'd have to search a while to find Old Sol again. I can't see just where he is. Of course, I could locate him by means of the gyroscope settings, but I'm afraid I wouldn't find him so easily visually."
"Say! You sure are a fi
ne one to pilot an expedition in space!” cried Wade in mock horror. “I think we ought to demote him for that! Imagine! He plans a trip of a thousand million light years, and then gets us out seven light years and says he doesn't know where he is! Doesn't even know where home is! I'm glad we have a cautious man like Morey along.” He shook his head sadly.
They took a series of six plates of the sun, using different magnifications.
"These plates will help prove our story, too,” said Morey as he looked at the finished plates. “We might have gone only a little way into space, up from the plane of the ecliptic and taken plates through a wide angle camera. But we'd have had to go at least seven years into the past to get a picture like this."
The new self-developing short-exposure plates, while not in perfect color balance, were more desirable for this work, since they took less time on exposure.
Morey and the others joined Arcot in the control room and strapped themselves into the cushioned seats. Since the space strain mechanism had proved itself in the first test, they felt they needed no more observations than they could make from the control room meters.
Arcot gazed out at the spot that was their immediate goal and said slowly: “How much bigger than Sol is that star, Morey?"
"It all depends on how you measure size,” Morey replied. “It is two and a half times as heavy, has four times the volume, and radiates twenty-five times as much light. In other words, one hundred million tons of matter disappear each second in that star.
"That's for Sirius A, of course. Sirius B, its companion, is a different matter; it's a white dwarf. It has only one one-hundred-twenty-five-thousandths the volume of Sirius A, but it weighs one third as much. It radiates more per square inch than our sun, but, due to its tiny size, it is very faint. That star, though almost as massive as the sun, is only about the size of Earth."
"You sure have those statistics down pat!” said Fuller, laughing. “But I must say they're interesting. What's that star made of, anyway? Solid lux metal?"
The Battle of the Infinite Trilogy Page 26
