by Anthology
"But our space has such terrific curvature that it only takes a fraction of a second for light to make the trip. It has gone all the way around our little cosmos and come back again.
"If we'd shot at it, we would have really done ourselves in! The ray beam would go around and hit us from behind!"
"Say, that is a nice proposition!" laughed Fuller. "Then we'll be accompanied by those ghosts all the way? There goes the spirit 'nine fathoms deep' which moves the ship—the ghosts that work the sails. This will be a real Ancient Mariner trip!"
It was like that famed voyage in another way, too. The men found little to do as they passed on at high speed through the vast realm of space. The chronometer pointed out the hours with exasperating slowness. The six hours that were to elapse before the first stop seemed as many days. They had thought of this trip as a wonderful adventure in itself, but the soundless continued monotony was depressing. They wandered around, aimlessly. Wade tried to sleep, but after lying strapped in his bunk for half an hour, he gave up in despair.
Arcot saw that the strain of doing nothing was not going to be good for his little crew and decided to see what could be done about it.
He went down to the laboratory and looked for inspiration. He found it.
"Hey! Morey! Wade! Fuller! Come on down here! I've got an idea!" he called.
They came to find him looking meditatively at the power pack from one of the flying suits he had designed. He had taken the lux metal case off and was looking at the neat apparatus that lay within.
"These are equipped for use with the space suits, of course," Morey pointed out, "and that gives us protection against gases. But I wonder if we might install protection against mechanical injury—with intent to damage aforethought! In other words, why not equip these suits with a small invisibility apparatus? We have it on the ship, but we might need personal protection, too."
"Great idea," said Wade, "provided you can find room in that case."
"I think we can. We won't need to add anything but a few tuning devices, really, and they don't take a whale of a lot of power."
Arcot pointed out the places where they could be put; also, he replaced some of the old induction coils with one of his new storage cells and got far higher efficiency from the tubes.
But principally, it was something to do.
Indeed, it was so thoroughly something to do that the six hours had almost elapsed before they realized it. In a very short time, they returned again to the control room and strapped themselves in.
Arcot reached toward the little red switch that controlled the titanic energies of the huge coil below and pulled it back a quarter of the way.
"There go the ghosts!" he said. The images had quickly disappeared, seemingly leaping away from them at terrific speed as the space in which the ship was enclosed opened out more and more and the curvature decreased. They were further away from themselves!
Easing back a quarter at a time, to prevent sparks again flying about in the atmosphere of the ship, Arcot cut the power to zero, and the ship was standing still once more.
They hurriedly dived to the observatory and looked eagerly out the window.
Far, far behind them, floating in the marvelous, soft, utter blackness of space, was a shining disc made up of myriads of glowing points. And it didn't seem to be a huge thing at a great distance, but simply a small glowing object a few feet outside the window.
So perfectly clear was their view through the lux metal wall and the black, empty space that all sense of distance was lost. It seemed more a miniature model of their universe—a tiny thing that floated close behind them, unwavering, shining with a faint light, a heatless illumination that made everything in the darkened observatory glow very faintly. It was the light of three hundred million suns seen at a distance of three million million million miles! And it seemed small because there was nothing with which to compare it.
It was an amazingly beautiful thing, that tiny floating disc of light.
Morey floated over to the cameras and began to take pictures.
"I'd like to take a color shot of that," he said a few minutes later, "but that would require a direct shot through the reflector telescope and a time exposure. And I can't do that; the ship is moving."
"Not enough to make any difference," Arcot contradicted. "We're moving away from it in a straight line, and that thing is three quintillion miles away. We're not moving fast enough to cause any measurable contraction in a time exposure. As for having a steady platform, this ship weighs a quarter of a million tons and is held by gyroscopes. We won't shake it."
While Morey took the time exposure, Arcot looked at the enlarged image in the telectroscope and tried to make angular measurements from the individual stars. This he found impossible. Although he could spot Betelgeuse and Antares because of their tremendous radiation, they were too close together for measurements; the angle subtended was too small.
Finally, he decided to use the distance between Antares and S Doradus in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, one of the two clouds of stars which float as satellites to the Galaxy itself.
To double-check, he used the radius of the Galaxy as base to calculate the distance. The distances checked. The ship was five hundred thousand light years from home!
After all the necessary observations were made, they swung the ship on its axis and looked ahead for a landing place.
The nebulae ahead were still invisible to the naked eye except as points, but the telectroscope finally revealed one as decidedly nearer than the rest. It seemed to be a young Island Universe, for there was still a vast cloud of gas and dust from which stars were yet to be born in the central whorl—a single titanic gas cloud that stretched out through a million billion miles of space.
"Shall we head for that?" asked Arcot at last, as Morey finished his observations.
"I think it would be as good as any—there are more stars there than we can hope to visit."
"Well, then, here we go!"
Arcot dived for the control room, while Morey shut off the telectroscope and put the latest photographs in the file.
Suddenly space was snapping about him—they were off again. Another shock of surging energy—another—the ship leaped forward at tremendous speed—still greater—then they were rushing at top speed, and beside them ran the ghost ships of the Ancient Mariner.
Morey pushed himself into the control room just as Arcot, Wade, and Fuller were getting ready to start for the lab.
"We're off for quite a while, now," he said. "Our goal is about five days away. I suggest we stop at the end of four days, make more accurate measurements, then plan a closer stop.
"I think from now on we ought to sleep in relays, so that there will be three of us awake at all times. I'll turn in now for ten hours, and then someone else can sleep. Okay?"
It was agreed, and in the meantime the three on duty went down to the lab to work.
Arcot had finished the installation of the invisibility apparatus in his suit at the end of ten hours, much to his disappointment. He tested it, then cast about for something to do while Wade and Morey added the finishing touches to theirs.
Morey came down, and when Wade had finished his, which took another quarter of an hour, he took the off duty shift.
Arcot had gone to the library, and Morey was at work down below. Fuller had come up, looking for something to do, and had hit upon the excellent idea of fixing a meal.
He had just begun his preparations in the kitchen when suddenly the Ancient Mariner gave a violent leap, and the men, not expecting any weight, suddenly fell in different ways with terrific force!
Fuller fell half the length of the galley and was knocked out by the blow. Wade, asleep in bed, was awakened violently by the shock, and Morey, who had been strapped in his chair, was badly shaken.
Everyone cried out simultaneously—and Arcot was on his way to the control room. The first shock was but a forerunner of the storm. Suddenly the ship was hurled violently about; the air was
shot through with great burning sparks; the snapping hiss of electricity was everywhere, and every pointed metal object was throwing streamers of blue electric flame into the air! The ship rocked, heaved, and cavorted wildly, as though caught in the play of titanic forces!
Scrambling wildly along the hand-holds, Arcot made his way towards the control room, which was now above, now below, and now to one side of him as the wildly variable acceleration shook the ship. Doggedly, he worked his way up, frequently getting severe burns from the flaming sparks.
Below, in the power room, the relays were crashing in and out wildly.
Then, suddenly, a new sound was added just as Arcot pulled himself into the control chair and strapped himself down. The radiation detector buzzed out its screaming warning!
"COSMIC RAYS!" Arcot yelled. "HIGH CONCENTRATION!"
He slapped at the switch which shot the heavy relux screens across every window in the ship.
There was a sudden crash and a fuse went out below—a fuse made of a silver bar two feet thick! In an instant, the flames of the burning sparks flared up and died. The ship cavorted madly, shaking mightily in the titanic, cosmic forces that surrounded it—the forces that made the highest energy form in the universe!
Arcot knew that nothing could be done with the power coil. It was drained; the circuit was broken. He shifted in the molecular drive, pushing the acceleration to four gravities, as high as the men could stand.
And still the powerful ship was being tossed about, the plaything of inconceivable forces. They lived only because the forces did not try to turn the ship more violently, not because of the strength of the ship, for nothing could resist the awful power around them.
As a guide, Arcot used the compass gyroscope, the only one not twisted far out of its original position; with it, he managed to steer a fairly straight course.
Meanwhile, in the power room, Wade and Morey were working frantically to get the space-strain drive coil recharged. Despite the strength-sapping strain of working under four gravities of acceleration, they managed to get the auxiliary power unit into operation. In a few moments, they had it pouring its energies into the coil-bank so that they could charge up the central drive coil.
Another silver bar fuse was inserted, and Wade checked the relays to make sure they were in working order.
Fuller, who had regained consciousness, worked his way laboriously down to the power room carrying three space-suits. He had stopped in the lab to get the power belts, and the three men quickly donned them to help them overcome the four-gravity pull.
Another half hour sped by as the bucking ship forced its way through the terrific field in space.
Suddenly they felt a terrific jolt again—then the ship was moving more smoothly, and gradually it was calm. They were through!
"Have we got power for the space-strain drive yet?" Arcot called through the intercom.
"Enough," Morey cried. "Try it!"
Arcot cut off the molecular motion drive, and threw in all the space-control power he had. The ship was suddenly supercharged with energy. It jarred suddenly—then was quiet. He allowed ten minutes to pass, then he cut off the drive and allowed the ship to go into free fall.
Morey's voice came over the intercom. "Arcot, things are really busted up down here! We had to haywire half the drive together."
"I'll be right down. Every instrument on the ship seems to be out of kilter!"
It was a good thing they had plenty of spare parts; some of the smaller relays had burned out completely, and several of the power leads had fused under the load that had been forced through them.
The space-strain drive had been leaking energy at a terrific rate; without further repair, it could not function much longer.
In the power room, Arcot surveyed the damage. "Well, boys, we'd better get to work. We're stranded here until we get that drive repaired!"
VIII
Forty hours later, Arcot was running the ship smoothly at top speed once again. The four men had gone to bed after more than thirty hours of hard work. That, coupled with the exhaustion of working under four gravities, as they had while the ship was going through the storm, was enough to make them sleep soundly.
Arcot had awakened before the others and had turned on the drive after resetting their course.
After that was done, there was little to do, and time began to hang heavily on Arcot's hands. He decided to make a thorough inspection of the hull when the others awoke. The terrific strain might have opened cracks in the lux metal hull that would not be detectable from the inside because the inner wall was separated from the outer envelope.
Accordingly, he got out the spacesuits, making sure the oxygen tanks were full and all was ready. Then he went into the library, got out some books, and set about some calculations he had in mind.
When Morey woke, some hours later, he found Arcot still at work on his calculations.
"Hey!" he said, swinging himself into the chair beside Arcot, "I thought you'd be on the lookout for more cosmic rays!"
"Curious delusion, wasn't it?" asked Arcot blandly. "As a matter of fact, I've been busy doing some figuring. I think our chance of meeting another such region is about one in a million million million million. Considering those chances, I don't think we need to worry. I don't see how we ever met one—but the chances of hitting one are better than hitting two."
Just then Fuller stuck his head in the door.
"Oh," he said, "so you're at it already? Well, I wonder if one of you could tell me just what it was we hit? I've been so busy I haven't had a chance to think."
"Don't take the chance now, then," grinned Morey. "You might strain your brain."
"Please!" Fuller pleaded, wincing. "Not before breakfast. Just explain what that storm was."
"We simply came to a region in space where cosmic rays are created," explained Arcot.
Fuller frowned. "But there's nothing out here to generate cosmic rays!"
Arcot nodded. "True. I think I know their real source, but I believe I'll merely say they are created here. I want to do more work on this. My idea for an energy source greater than any other in the universe has been confirmed.
"At any rate, they are created in that space, a perfect vacuum, and the space there is distorted terrifically by the titanic forces at work. It is bent and twisted far out of the normal, even curvature, and it was that bumpy spot in space that threw us about so.
"When we first entered, using the space-strain drive, the space around the ship, distorted as it was, conflicted with the region of the cosmic ray generation and the ship lost out. The curvature of space that the ship caused was sometimes reinforced and sometimes cancelled out by the twisted space around it, and the tremendous surges of current back and forth from the main power coil to the storage coils caused the electric discharges that kept burning through the air. I notice we all got a few burns from that. The field was caused by the terrific surges of current, and that magnetic field caused the walls of the ship to heat up due to the generation of electric current in the walls."
Fuller looked around at the walls of the ship. "Well, the Ancient Mariner sure took a beating."
"As a matter of fact, I was worried about that," said Arcot. "Strong as that hull is, it might easily have been strained in that field of terrific force. If it happened to hit two 'space waves' at once, it might have given it an acceleration in two different directions at once, which would strain the walls with a force amounting to thousands of tons. I laid out the suits up front, and I think we might reasonably get out there and take a look at the old boat. When Wade gets up—well, well—speak of the devil! My, doesn't he look energetic?"
Wade's huge body was floating in through the library door. He was yawning sleepily and rubbing his eyes. It was evident he had not yet washed, and his growing beard, which was heavy and black on his cheeks, testified to his need for a shave. The others had shaved before coming into the library.
"Wade," said Arcot, "we're going outside, and we have t
o have someone in here to operate the airlock. Suppose you get to work on the hirsute adornment; there's an atomic hydrogen cutting torch down in the lab you can use, if you wish. The rest of us are going outside." Then Arcot's voice became serious. "By the way, don't try any little jokes like starting off with a little acceleration. I don't think you would—you've got good sense—but I like to make certain. If you did, we'd be left behind, and you'd never find us in the vast immensity of intergalactic space."
It wasn't a pleasant idea to contemplate. Each of the suits had a radio for communication with each other and with the ship, but they would only carry a few hundred miles. A mere step in space!
Wade shook his head, grinning. "I have no desire to be left all by myself on this ship, thank you. You don't need to worry."
A few minutes later, Arcot, Morey, and Fuller stepped out of the airlock and set to work, using power flashlights to examine the outer hull for any signs of possible strain.
The flashlights, equipped as they were with storage coils for power, were actually powerful searchlights, but in the airlessness of space, the rays were absolutely invisible. They could only be seen when they hit the relux inner wall at such an angle that they were reflected directly into the observer's eyes. The lux metal wall, being transparent, was naturally invisible, and the smooth relux, reflecting one hundred percent of the incident light, did not become illuminated, for illumination is the result of the scattering of light.
It was necessary to look closely and pass the beams over every square inch of the surface. However, a crack would be rough, and hence would scatter light and be even more readily visible than otherwise.
To their great relief, after an hour and a half of careful inspection, none of them had found any signs of a crack, and they went back into the ship to resume the voyage.
Again they hurled through space, the twin ghost ships following them closely. Hour after hour the ship went on. Now they had something else to do. They were at work calculating some problems that Arcot had suggested in connection with the velocities of motion that had been observed in the stars at the edge of the island universe they were approaching. Since these stars revolved about the mass of the entire galaxy, it was possible to calculate the mass of the entire universe by averaging the values from several stars. Their results were not exact, but they were reliable enough. They found the universe to have a mass of two hundred and fifty million suns, only a little less than the home Galaxy. It was an average-sized nebula.
