Islands of Space Read online

  IV

  The _Ancient Mariner_ was built in the big Transcontinental shops inNewark; the power they needed was not available in the smaller shops.

  Working twenty-four hours a day, in three shifts, skilled men took twomonths to finish the hull according to Fuller's specifications. The hugewalls of lux metal required great care in construction, for they couldnot be welded; they had to be formed in position. And they could only bepolished under powerful magnets, where the dense magnetic field softenedthe lux metal enough to allow a diamond polisher to do the job.

  When the hull was finished, there came the laborious work of installingthe power plant and the tremendous power leads, the connectors, thecircuits to the relays--a thousand complex circuits.

  Much of it was standard: the molecular power tubes, the molecular rayprojectors, the power tubes for the invisibility apparatus, and manyother parts. All the relays were standard, the gyroscopic stabilizerswere standard, and the electromagnetic braking equipment for the gyroswas standard.

  But there would be long days of work ahead for Arcot, Wade, and Morey,for only they could install the special equipment; only they could putin the complicated wiring, for no one else on Earth understood thecircuits they had to establish.

  During the weeks of waiting, Arcot and his friends worked on auxiliarydevices to be used with the ship. They wanted to make some improvementson the old molecular ray pistols, and to develop atomic powered heatprojectors for hand use. The primary power they stored in smallspace-strain coils in the handgrip of the pistol. Despite their smallsize, the coils were capable of storing power for thirty hours ofcontinuous operation of the rays. The finished weapon was scarcelylarger than a standard molecular ray pistol.

  Arcot pointed out that many of the planets they might visit would belarger than Earth, and they lacked any way of getting about readilyunder high gravity. Since something had to be done about that, Arcot didit. He demonstrated it to his friends one day in the shop yard.

  Morey and Wade had just been in to see Fuller about some details of theship, and as they came out, Arcot called them over to his work bench. Hewas wearing a space suit without the helmet.

  The modern space suit is made of woven lux metal wires of extremelysmall diameter and airproofed with a rubberoid fluorocarbon plastic, andfurnished with air and heating units. Made as it was, it offeredprotection nothing else could offer; it was almost a perfect insulatorand was resistant to the attack of any chemical reagent. Not evenelemental fluorine could corrode it. And the extreme strength of the luxmetal fiber made it stronger, pound for pound, than steel or coronium.

  On Arcot's back was a pack of relux plated metal. It was connected byrelux web belts to a broad belt that circled Arcot's waist. One thincable ran down the right arm to a small relux tube about eight incheslong by two inches in diameter.

  "Watch!" Arcot said, grinning.

  He reached to his belt and flipped a little switch.

  "So long! See you later!" He pointed his right arm toward the ceilingand sailed lightly into the air. He lowered the angle of his arm andmoved smoothly across the huge hangar, floating toward the shining bulkof the rapidly forming _Ancient Mariner_. He circled the room, risingand sinking at will, then headed for the open door.

  "Come out and watch me where there's more room," he called.

  Out in the open, he darted high up into the air until he was a merespeck in the sky. Then he suddenly came dropping down and landed lightlybefore them, swaying on his feet and poised lightly on his toes.

  "Some jump," said Morey, in mock surprise.

  "Yeah," agreed Fuller. "Try again."

  "Or," Wade put in, "give me that weight annihilator and I'll beat you atyour own game. What's the secret?"

  "That's a cute gadget. How much load does it carry?" asked Morey, morepractically.

  "I can develop about ten tons as far as it goes, but the human bodycan't take more than five gravities, so we can only visit planets withless than that surface gravity. The principle is easy to see; I'll showyou."

  He unhooked the cables and took the power pack from his back. "The mainthing is the molecular power unit here, electrically heated and mountedon a small, massive gyroscope. That gyro is necessary, too. I triedleaving it out and almost took a nosedive. I had it coupled directly tothe body and leaned forward a little bit when I was in the air. Withouta gyro to keep the drive upright, I took a loop and started heading forthe ground. I had to do some fancy gymnastics to keep from ending up sixfeet under--literally.

  "The power is all generated in the pack with a small power plate andseveral storage coils. I've also got it hooked to these holsters at mybelt so we can charge the pistols while we carry them.

  "The control is this secondary power cable running down my arm to myhand. That gives you your direction, and the rheostat here at the beltchanges the velocity.

  "I've only made this one so far, but I've ordered six others like it. Ithought you guys might like one, too."

  "I think you guessed right!" said Morey, looking inside the power case."Hey! Why all the extra room in the case?"

  "It's an unperfected invention as yet; we might want to put some morestuff in there for our own private use."

  Each of the men tried out the apparatus and found it quite satisfactory.

  Meanwhile, there was other work to be done.

  Wade had been given the job of gathering the necessary food and anythingelse in the way of supplies that he might think of. Arcot was collectingthe necessary spare parts and apparatus. Morey was gathering a smalllibrary and equipping a chemistry laboratory. Fuller was to get togetherthe necessary standard equipment for the ship--tables, seats, bunks, andother furniture.

  It took months of work, and it seemed it would never be finished, butfinally, one clear, warm day in August, the ship was completely equippedand ready to go.

  On the last inspection, the elder Dr. Arcot and the elder Mr. Morey wentwith the four younger men. They stood beside the great intergalacticcruiser, looking up at its shining hull.

  "We came a bit later than we expected, son," said Dr. Arcot, "but westill expect a good show." He paused and frowned, "I understand youdon't intend to take any trial trip. What's the idea?"

  Arcot had been afraid his father would be worried about that, so heframed his explanation carefully. "Dad, we figured this ship out to thelast decimal place; it's the best we can make it. Remember, themolecular motion drive will get a trial first; we'll give it a trialtrip when we leave the sun. If there's any trouble, naturally, we'llreturn. But the equipment is standard, so we're expecting no trouble.

  "The only part that would require a trial trip is the space-controlapparatus, and there's no way to give that a trial trip. Remember, wehave to get far enough out from the sun so that the gravitational fieldwill be weak enough for the drive to overcome it. If we tried it thisclose, we'd just be trying to neutralize the sun's gravity. We'd bepouring out energy, wasting a great deal of it; but out away from thesun, we'll get most of the energy back.

  "On the other hand, when we do get out and get started we will go fasterthan light, and we'd be hopelessly beyond the range of the molecularmotion drive in an instant. In other words, if the space-control drivedoesn't work, we can't come back, and if it does work, there's no needto come back.

  "And if anything goes wrong, we're the only ones who could fix it,anyway. If anything goes wrong, I'll radio Earth. You ought to be ableto hear from me in about a dozen years." He smiled suddenly. "Say! Wemight go out and get back here in time to hear ourselves talking!

  "But you can see why we felt that there was little reason for a trialtrip. If it's a failure, we'll never be back to say so; if it isn't,we'll be able to continue."

  His father still looked worried, but he nodded in acquiescence. "Perfectlogic, son, but I guess we may as well give up the discussion.Personally, I don't like it. Let's see this ship of yours."

  The great hull was two hundred feet long and thirty feet in diameter.The outer wall, one foot of so
lid lux metal, was separated from theinner, one-inch relux wall by a two inch gap which would be evacuated inspace. The two walls were joined in many places by small lux metalcross-braces. The windows consisted of spaces in the relux wall,allowing the occupants to see through the transparent lux hull.

  From the outside, it was difficult to detect the exact outline of theship, for the clear lux metal was practically invisible and the foot ofit that surrounded the more visible part of the ship gave a curiousoptical illusion. The perfect reflecting ability of the relux made theinner hull difficult to see, too. It was more by absence than presencethat one detected it; it blotted out things behind it.

  The great window of the pilot room disclosed the pilot seats and thegreat switchboard to one side. Each of the windows was equipped with arelux shield that slid into position at the touch of a switch, and thesewere 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 ofthe ship.

  "Come on in--see the inside," suggested Fuller.

  They entered through the airlock close to the base of the ship. Theheavy lux door was opened by automatic machinery from the inside, butthe combination depended on the use of a molecular ray and the knowledgeof the correct place, which made it impossible for anyone to open itunless they had the ray and knew where to use it.

  From the airlock, they went directly to the power room. Here they heardthe soft purring of a large oscillator tube and the indistinguishablemurmur of smoothly running AC generators powered by large contraterrenereactors.

  The elder Dr. Arcot glanced in surprise at the heavy-duty ammeter in acontrol panel.

  "Half a billion amperes! Good Lord! Where is all that power going?" Helooked at his son.

  "Into the storage coils. It's going in at ten kilovolts, so that's afive billion kilowatt supply. It's been going for half an hour and hashalf an hour to run. It takes two tons of matter to charge the coil tocapacity, and we're carrying twenty tons of fuel--enough for tencharges. 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 blackcylinder nearly two feet in diameter and extending out through the wallin the rear. It was made integral with two giant lux metal beams thatreached to the bow of the ship in a long, sweeping curve. From one ofthe power switchboards, two heavy cables ran up to the giant cylinder.

  "That's the main horizontal power unit. We can develop an accelerationof 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 othertwo 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 wasoccupied by a heavy pedestal of lux metal upon which was a huge,relux-encased, double torus storage coil. There was a large switchboardat the opposite end, while around the room, in ordered groups, stood thefamiliar double coils, each five feet in diameter. The space within themwas 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 onefor?"

  "That's the main space control," the younger Arcot answered. "While ourpower is stored in the smaller ones, we can shoot it into this one,which, you will notice, is constructed slightly differently. Instead ofholding the field within it, completely enclosed, the big one willaffect all the space about it. We will then be enclosed in what might becalled a hyperspace of our own making."

  "I see," said his father. "You go into hyperspace and move at any speedyou 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'rein that hyperspace. We'll simply aim the ship in the direction we wantto go and then go into hyperspace. The only thing we have to avoid isstars; their gravitational fields would drain the energy out of theapparatus and we'd end up in the center of a white-hot star. Meteors andsuch, we don't have to worry about; their fields aren't strong enough todrain the coils, and since we won't be in normal space, we can't hitthem."

  The elder Morey looked worried. "If you can't see your way back you'llget lost! And you can't radio back for help."

  "Worse than that!" said Arcot. "We couldn't receive a signal of any kindafter we get more than three hundred light years away; there weren't anyradios before that.

  "What we'll do is locate ourselves through the sun's light. We'll takephotographs every so often and orient ourselves by them when we comeback."

  "That sounds like an excellent method of stellar navigation," agreedMorey senior. "Let's see the rest of the ship." He turned and walkedtoward the farther door.

  The next room was the laboratory. On one side of the room was a completephysics lab and on the other was a well-stocked and well-equippedchemistry lab. They could perform many experiments here that no man hadbeen able to perform due to lack of power. In this ship they had moregenerating facilities than all the power stations of Earth combined!

  Arcot opened the next door. "This next room is the physics and chemistrystoreroom. Here we have a duplicate--in some cases, six or sevenduplicates--of every piece of apparatus on board, and plenty of materialto make more. Actually, we have enough equipment to make a new ship outof what we have here. It would be a good deal smaller, but it wouldwork.

  "The greater part of our materials is stored in the curvature of theship, where it will be easy to get at if necessary. All our water andfood 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 smallrooms on each side of the corridor down the center; at the extreme nosewas the control room, and at the extreme stern was the observatory. Theobservatory was equipped with a small but exceedingly powerfultelectroscope, developed from those the Nigrans had left on one of thedeserted planets Sol had captured in return for the loss of Pluto to theBlack Star. The arc commanded by the instrument was not great, but itwas easy to turn the ship about, and most of their observations could bemade without trouble.

  Each of the men had a room of his own; there was a small galley and alibrary equipped with all the books the four men could think of as beinguseful. The books and all other equipment were clamped in place to keepthem from flying around loose when the ship accelerated.

  The control room at the nose was surrounded by a hemisphere oftransparent lux metal which enabled them to see in every directionexcept directly behind, and even that blind spot could be covered bystationing a man in the observatory.

  There were heat projectors and molecular ray projectors, each operatedfrom the control room in the nose. To complete the armament, there weremore projectors in the stern, controlled from the observatory, and aset on either side controlled from the library and the galley.

  The ship was provisioned for two years--two years without stops. Withthe possibility of stopping on other planets, the four men could existindefinitely in the ship.

  After the two older men had been shown all through the intergalacticvessel, the elder Arcot turned to his old friend. "Morey, it looks as ifit 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 knowthere's a lot more I could say." Morey senior looked at them and startedtoward the airlock.

  "Goodbye, son," said the elder Arcot. "Goodbye, men. I'll be expectingyou any time within two years. We can have no warning, I suppose; yourship will outrace the radio beam. Goodbye." Dr. Arcot joined his oldfriend and they went outside.

  The heavy lux metal door slid into place behind them, and the thickplastic cushions sealed the entrance to the airlock.
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  The workmen and the other personnel around the ship cleared the area andstood well back from the great hull. The two older men waved to the meninside the ship.

  Suddenly the ship trembled, and rose toward the sky.