The Battle of the Infinite Trilogy

by John W. Campbell

  After that, it was easy to shoot himself over to the door, out into the corridor and into the control room without being seen by Morey, who was in Wade's room.

  Just as Wade and Morey reached the doorway to the control room, Arcot decided it was time to shut the power off. Both of the men, laboring under more than eight hundred pounds of weight, were suddenly weightless. All the strength of their powerful muscles were expended in hurling them against the far wall.

  The complaints were loud, but they finally simmered down to an earnest demand to know how in the devil Arcot had managed to get off dead center.

  "Why, that was easy,” he said airily. “I just turned on a little power; I fell under the influence of the weight and then it was easy to get to the control room."'

  "Come on,” Wade demanded. “The truth! How did you get here?"

  "Why, I just pushed myself here."

  'Yes, no doubt. But how did you get hold of anything to push?"

  "I just took a handful of air and threw it away and reached the wall."

  "Oh, of course-and how did you hold the air?"

  "I just took some air and threw it away and reached the wall."

  Which was all they could learn. Arcot was going to keep his system secret, it seemed.

  "At any rate,” Arcot continued, “I am back in the control room, where I belong, and you are not in the observatory where you belong. Now get out of my territory!"

  Morey pushed himself back to the observatory, and after a few minutes, his voice came over the intercom. “Let's move on a bit more, Arcot. We still can't get both galaxies on the same plate. Let's go on for another hour and take our pictures from that point."

  Fuller had awakened and come in in the meantime, and he wanted to know why they didn't take some pictures from this spot.

  "No point in it,” said Morey. “We have the ones we took coming in; what we want is a wide-angle shot."

  Arcot threw on the space-strain drive once more, and they headed on at top speed—

  They were all in the control room, watching the instruments and joking-principally the latter-when it happened. One instant they were moving smoothly, weightlessly along. The next instant, the ship rocked as though it had been struck violently! The air was a snapping inferno of shooting sparks, and there came the sharp crash of the suddenly volatilized silver bar that was their main power fuse. Simultaneously, they were hurled forward with terrific force; the straps that held them in place creaked with the sudden strain, and the men felt weak and faint.

  Consciousness nearly left them; they had been burned in a dozen places by the leaping sparks.

  Then it was over. Except that the ghost ships no longer followed them, the Ancient Mariner seemed unchanged. Around them, they could see the dim glowing of the galaxies.

  "Brother! We came near something!” Arcot cried. “It may be a wandering star! Take a look around, quick!"

  But the dark of space seemed utterly empty around them as they coasted weightless through space. Then Arcot snapped off the lights of the control room, and in a moment his eyes had become accustomed to the dim lights.

  It was dead ahead of them. It was a dull red glow, so dim it was scarcely visible. Arcot realized it was a dead star.

  "There it is, Morey!” he said. “A dead star, directly ahead of us! Good God, how close are we?"

  They were falling straight toward the dim red bulk.

  "How far are we from it?” Fuller asked.

  "At least several million—” Morey began. Then he looked at the distance recorded on the meteor detector. “ARCOT! FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE DO SOMETHING! THAT THING IS ONLY A FEW HUNDRED MILES AWAY!"

  "There's only one thing to do,” Arcot said tightly. “We can never hope to avoid that thing; we haven't got the power. I'm going to try for an orbit around it. We'll fall toward it and give the ship all the acceleration she'll take. There's no time to calculate-I'll just pile on the speed until we don't fall into it."

  The others, strapped into the control chairs, prepared themselves for the acceleration to come.

  If the Ancient Mariner had dropped toward the star from an infinite distance, Arcot could have applied enough power to put the ship in a hyperbolic orbit which would have carried them past the star. But they had come in on the space drive, and had gotten fairly close before the gravitational field had drained the power from the main coil, and it was not until the space field had broken that they had started to accelerate toward the star. Their velocity would not be great enough to form an escape orbit.

  Even now, they would fall far short of enough velocity to get into an elliptical orbit unless they used the molecular drive.

  Arcot headed toward one edge of the star, and poured power into the molecular drive. The ship shot forward under an additional five and a half gravities of acceleration. Their velocity had been five thousand miles per second when they entered hyperspace, and they were swiftly adding to their original velocity.

  They did not, of course, feel the pull of the sun, since they were in free fall in its field; they could only feel the five and a half gravities of the molecular drive. Had they been able to experience the pull of the star, they would have been crushed by their own weight.

  Their speed was mounting as they drew nearer to the star, and Arcot was forcing the ship on with all the additional power he could get. But he knew that the only hope they had was to get the ship in a closed ellipse around the star, and a closed ellipse meant that they would be forever bound to the star as a planet! Helpless, for not even the titanic power of the Ancient Mariner could enable them to escape!

  As the dull red of the dead sun ballooned toward them, Arcot said: “I think we'll make an orbit, all right, but we're going to be awfully close to the surface of that thing!"

  The others were silent—they merely watched Arcot and the star as Arcot made swift movements with the controls, doing all he could to establish them in an orbit that would be fairly safe.

  It seemed like an eternity-five and a half gravities of acceleration held the men in their chairs almost as well as the straps of the anti-acceleration units that bound them. When a man weighs better than half a ton, he doesn't feel like moving much.

  Fuller whispered to Morey out of the corner of his sagging mouth. “What on Earth-I mean, what in Space is that thing? We're within only a few hundred miles, you said, so it must be pretty small. How could it pull us around like this?"

  "It's a dead white dwarf-a ‘black’ dwarf, you might say,” Morey replied. “As the density of such matter increases, the volume of the star depends less and less on its temperature. In a dwarf with the mass of the sun, the temperature effect is negligible; it's the action of the forces within the electron-nucleon gas which makes up the star that reigns supreme.

  "It's been shown that if a white dwarf—or a black one—is increased in mass, it begins to decrease sharply in volume after a certain point is reached. In fact, no cold star can exist with a volume greater than about one and a half times the mass of the sun-as the mass increases and the pressure goes up, the star shrinks in volume because of the degenerate matter in it. At a little better than 1.4 times the mass of the sun-our sun, I mean: Old Sol-the star would theoretically collapse to a point.

  "That has almost happened in this case. The actual limit is when the star has reached the density of a neutron, and this star hasn't collapsed that far by a long shot.

  "But that star is only forty kilometers-or less than twenty-five miles in diameter!"

  It took nearly two hours of careful juggling to get an orbit which Arcot considered reasonably circular.

  And when they finally did, Wade looked at the sky above them and shouted: “Say, look! What are all those streaks?"

  Arcing up from the surface of the dull red plain below them and going over the ship, were several dim streaks of light across the sky. One of them was brighter than the rest, a bright white streak. The streaks didn't move; they seemed to have been painted on the sky overhead', glowing bands of unwav
ering light.

  "Those,” said Arcot, “are the nebulae. That wide streak is the one we just left. The bright streak must be a nearby star.

  "They look like streaks because we're moving so fast in so small an orbit.” He pointed to the red star beneath them. “We're less than twenty miles from the center of that thing! We're almost exactly thirty kilometers from its center, or about ten kilometers from its surface! But, because of it's great mass, our orbital velocity is something terrific!

  "We're going around that thing better than three hundred times every second; our ‘year’ is three milliseconds long! Our orbital velocity is seven hundred thousand kilometers per second!

  "We're moving along at about a fifth of the speed of light!"

  "Are we safe in this orbit?” Fuller asked.

  "Safe enough,” said Arcot bitterly. “So damned safe that I don't see how we'll ever break free. We can't pull away with all the power on this ship. We're trapped!

  "Well, I'm worn out from working under all that gravity; let's eat and get some sleep."

  "I don't feel like sleeping,” said Fuller. “You may call this safe, but it would only take an instant to fall down to the surface of that thing there.” He looked down at their inert, but titanically powerful enemy whose baleful glow seemed even now to be burning their funeral pyre.

  "Well,” said Arcot, “falling into it and flying off into space are two things you don't have to worry about. If we started toward it, we'd be falling, and our velocity would increase; as a result, we'd bounce right back out again. The magnitude of the force required to make us fall into that sun is appalling! the gravitational pull on us now amounts to about five billion tons, which is equalized by the centrifugal force of our orbital velocity. Any tendency to change it would be like trying to bend a spring with that much resistance.

  "We'd require a tremendous force to make us either fall into that star-or get away from it.

  "To escape, we have to lift this ship out against gravity. That means we'd have to lift about five million tons of mass. As we get farther out, our weight will decrease as the gravitational attraction drops off, but we would need such vast amounts of energy that they are beyond human conception.

  "We have burned up two tons of matter recharging the coils, and are now using another two tons to recharge them again. We need at least four tons to spare, and we only started out with twenty. We simply haven't got fuel enough to break loose from this star's gravitational hold, vast as the energy of matter is. Let's eat, and then we can sleep on the problem."

  Wade cooked a meal for them, and they ate in silence, trying to think of some way out of their dilemma. Then they tried to sleep on the problem, as Arcot had suggested, but it was difficult to relax. They were physically tired; they had gone through such great strains, even in the short time that they had been maneuvering, that they were very tired.

  Under a pull five times greater than normal gravity, they had tired in one-fifth the time they would have at one gravity, but their brains were still wide awake, trying to think of some way-any way-to get away from the dark sun.

  But at last sleep came.

  CHAPTER XI

  Morey thought he was the first to waken when, seven hours later, he dressed and dove lightly, noiselessly, out into the library. Suddenly, he noticed that the telectroscope was in operation-he heard the low hum of its smoothly working director motors.

  He turned and headed back toward the observatory. Arcot was busy with the telectroscope.

  "What's up, Arcot?” he demanded.

  Arcot looked up at him and dusted off his hands. “I've just been gimmicking up the telectroscope. We're going a-round this dead dwarf once every three milliseconds, which makes it awfully hard to see the stars around us. So I put in a cutoff which will shut the telectroscope off most of the’ time; it only looks at the sky once every three milliseconds. As a result, we can get a picture of what's going on around us very easily. It won't be a steady picture, but since we're getting a still picture three hundred times a second, it will be better than any moving picture film ever projected as far as accuracy is concerned.

  "I did it because I want to take a look at that bright streak in the sky. I think it'll be the means to our salvation—if there is any."

  Morey nodded. “I see what you mean; if that's another white dwarf-which it most likely is-we can use it to escape. I think I see what you're driving at."

  "If it doesn't work,” Arcot said coolly, “we can profit by the example of the people we left back there. Suicide is preferable to dying of cold."

  Morey nodded. “The question is: How helpless are we?"

  "Depends entirely ton that star; let's see if we can get a focus on it.” ||

  At the orbital velocity of the ship, focussing on the star was indeed a difficult thing to do. It took them well over an hour to get the image centered in the screen without its drifting off toward one edge; it took even longer to get the focus close enough to a sphere to give them a definite reading on the instruments. The image had started out as a streak, hut by taking smaller and smaller sections of the streak at the proper times, they managed to get a good, solid image. But to get it bright enough was another problem; they were only picking up a fraction of the light, and it had to be amplified greatly to make a visible image.

  When they finally got what they were looking for, Morey gazed steadily at the image. “Now the job is to figure the distance. And we haven't got much parallax to work with."

  "If we compute in the timing in our blinker system at opposite sides of the orbit, I think we can do it,” Arcot said.

  They went to work on the problem. When Fuller and Wade showed up, they were given work to do-Morey gave them equations to solve without telling them to what the figures applied.

  Finally Arcot said: “Their period about the common center of gravity is thirty-nine hours, as I figure it."

  Morey nodded. “Check. And that gives us a distance of two million miles apart."

  "Just what are you two up to?” asked Fuller. “What good is another star? The one we're interested in is this freak underneath us."

  "No,” Arcot corrected, “we're interested in getting away from the one beneath us, which is an entirely different matter. If we were midway between this star and that one, the gravitational effects of the two would be cancelled out, since we would be pulled as hard in one direction as the other. Then we'd be free of both pulls and could escape!

  "If we could get into that neutral area long enough to turn on our space strain drive, we could get away between them fast. Of course, a lot of our energy would be eaten up, but we'd get away.

  "That's our only hope,” Arcot concluded.

  "Yes, and what a whale of a hope it is,” Wade snorted sarcastically. “How are you going to get out to a point halfway between these two stars when you don't have enough power to lift this ship a few miles?"

  "If Mahomet can not go to the mountain,” misquoted Arcot, “then the mountain must come to Mahomet."

  "What are you going to do?” Wade asked in exasperation. “Beat Joshua? He made the sun stand still, but this is a job of throwing them around!"

  "It is,” agreed Arcot quietly, “and I intend to throw that star in such a way that we can escape between the twin fields! We can escape between the hammer and the anvil as millions of millions of millions of tons of matter crash into each other."

  "And you intend to swing that?” asked Wade in awe as he thought of the spectacle there would be when two suns fell into each other. “Well, I don't want to be around."

  "You haven't any choice,” Arcot grinned. Then his face grew serious. “What I want to do is simple. We have the molecular ray. Those stars are hot. They don't fall into each other because they are rotating about each other. Suppose that rotation were stopped-stopped suddenly and completely? The molecular ray acts catalytically; we won't supply the power to stop that star, the star itself will. All we have to do is cause the molecules to move in a direction opposite to the
rotation. We'll supply the impulse, and the star will supply the energy!

  "Our job will be to break away when the stars get close enough; we are really going to hitch our wagon to a star!

  "The mechanics of the job are simple. We will have to calculate when and how long to use the power, and when and how quickly to escape. We'll have to use the main power board to generate the ray and project it instead of the little ray units. With luck, we ought to be free of this star in three days!"

  Work was started at once. They had a chance of life in sight, and they had every intention of taking advantage of it! The calculating machines they had brought would certainly prove worth their mass in this one use. The observations were extremely difficult because the ship was rocketing a-round the star in such a rapid orbit. The calculations of the mass and distance and orbital motion of the other star were therefore very difficult, but the final results looked good.

  The other star and this one formed a binary, the two being of only slightly different mass and rotating about each other at a distance of roughly two million miles.

  The next problem was to calculate the time of fall from that point, assuming that it would stop instantaneously, which would be approximately true.

  The actual fall would take only seven hours under the tremendous acceleration of the two masses! Since the stars would fall toward each other, the ship would be drawn toward the falling mass, and since their orbit around the star took only a fraction of a second to complete, they had to make sure they were in the right position at the halfway point just before collision occurred. Also, their orbit would be greatly perturbed as the star approached, and it was necessary to calculate that in, too.

  Arcot calculated that in twenty-two hours, forty-six minutes, they would be in the most favorable position to start the fall. They could have started sooner, but there were some changes that had to be made in the wiring of the ship before they could start using the molecular ray at full power.

  "Well,” said Wade as he finally finished the laborious computations, “I hope we don't make a mistake and get caught between the two! And what happens if we find we haven't stopped the star after all?"