Islands of Space Page 7

  VI

  "What's the matter?" asked Fuller anxiously.

  Arcot pointed out the window at a red star that blazed in the distance."We got too near the field of gravity of that young giant and he threwus for a loss. We drained out three-fourths of the energy from our coilsand lost our bearings in the bargain. The attraction turned thegyroscopes and threw the ship out of line, so we no longer know wherethe sun is.

  "Well, come on, Morey; all we can do is start a search. At thisdistance, we'd best go by Sirius; it's brighter and nearer." He lookedat the instrument panel. "I was using the next lowest power and I stillcouldn't avoid that monster. This ship is just a little _too_ hot tohandle."

  Their position was anything but pleasant. They must pick out from thevast star field behind them the one star that was home, not knowingexactly where it was. But they had one tremendous help--the photographsof the star field around Sol that they had taken at the last stop. Allthey had to do was search for an area that matched their photographs.

  They found the sun at last, after they had spotted Sirius, but they hadhad to rotate the ship through nearly twenty-five degrees to do it.After establishing their bearings, they took new photographs for theirfiles.

  Meanwhile, Wade had been recharging the coils. When he was finished, hereported the fact to Arcot.

  "Fine," Arcot said. "And from now on, I'm going to use the leastpossible amount of power. It certainly isn't safe to use more."

  They started for the control room, much relieved. Arcot dived first,with Wade directly behind him. Wade decided suddenly to go into his roomand stopped himself by grabbing a handhold. Morey, following closebehind, bumped into him and was brought to rest, while Wade was pushedinto his room.

  But Fuller, coming last, slammed into Morey, who moved forward with newvelocity toward the control room, leaving Fuller hanging at rest in themiddle of the corridor.

  "Hey, Morey!" he laughed. "Send me a skyhook! I'm caught!" Isolated ashe was in the middle of the corridor, he couldn't push on anything andremained stranded.

  "Go to sleep!" advised Morey. "It's the most comfortable bed you'llfind!"

  Wade looked out of his room just then. "Well, if it isn't oldWeakmuscles Fuller! Weighs absolutely nothing and is still so weak hecan't push himself around."

  "Come on, though, Morey--give me a hand--I got you off dead center."Fuller flailed his hand helplessly.

  "Use your brains, if you have any," said Morey, "and see what you cando. Come on, Wade--we're going."

  Since they were going to use the space control, they would remain infree fall, and Fuller would remain helplessly suspended in mid-air.

  The air of the ship suddenly seemed supercharged with energy as thespace around them became gray; then the stars were all before them. Theship was moving forward again.

  "Well, old pals," said Fuller, "at least I have traffic blocked fairlywell if I feel like it, so eventually you'd have to help me. However--"He floundered clumsily as he removed one of his foam-rubber space-boots,"--my brains tell me that action is equal and opposite to reaction!" Andhe threw the boot with all possible velocity toward Morey!

  The reaction of the motion brought him slowly but surely to a handholdin the wall.

  In the meantime, the flying boot caught Morey in the chest with apronounced _smack_! as he struggled vainly to avoid it. Handicapped bythe lack of friction, his arms were not quite powerful enough to movehis mass as quickly as his legs might have done, for his inertia was asgreat as ever, so he didn't succeed in ducking.

  "Round one!" called Arcot, laughing. "Won by Kid Fuller on a TKO! Itappears he has brains and knows how to use them!"

  "You win," laughed Morey. "I concede the battle!"

  Arcot had cut off the space-strain drive by the time Fuller reached thecontrol room, and the men set about making more observations. They tookadditional photographs and turned on the drive again.

  Time passed monotonously after they had examined a few stars. There waslittle difference; each was but a scene of flaming matter. There waslittle interest in this work, and, as Fuller remarked, this was supposedto be a trip of exploration, not observation. They weren't astronomers;they were on a vacation. Why all the hard work? They couldn't do as gooda job as an experienced astronomer, so they decided to limit theirobservations to those necessary to retrace their path to Earth.

  "But we want to investigate for planets to land on, don't we?" askedMorey.

  "Sure," agreed Fuller. "But do we have to hunt at random for them? Can'twe look for stars like our own sun? Won't they be more apt to haveplanets like Sol's?"

  "It's an idea," replied Morey.

  "Well, why not try it then?" Fuller continued logically. "Let's pick outa G-0 type sun and head for it."

  They were now well out toward the edge of the Galaxy, some thirtythousand light years from home. Since they had originally headed outalong the narrow diameter of the lens-shaped mass of stars that formsour Island Universe, they would reach the edge soon.

  "We won't have much chance of finding a G-0 this far out," Arcot pointedout. "We're about out of stars. We've left most of the Galaxy behindus."

  "Then let's go on to another of the galactic nebulae," said Morey,looking out into the almost unbroken night of intergalactic space. Onlyhere and there could they see a star, separated from its nearestneighbor by thousands of light years of empty space.

  "You know," said Wade slowly, "I've been wondering about the progressalong scientific lines that a race out here might make. I mean, supposethat one of those lonely stars had planets, and suppose intelligent lifeevolved on one of those planets. I think their progress would be muchslower."

  "I see what you mean," Arcot said. "To us, of Earth, the stars aregigantic furnaces a few light years away. They're titanic tests tubes ofnature, with automatic reading devices attached, hung in the sky for usto watch. We have learned more about space from the stars than all theexperiments of the physicists of Earth ever secured for us. It was inthe atoms of the suns that we first counted the rate of revolutions ofthe electrons about their nuclei."

  "Couldn't they have watched their own sun?" Fuller asked.

  "Sure, but what could they compare it with? They couldn't see a whitedwarf from here. They couldn't measure the parallax to the nearest star,so they would have no idea of stellar distances. They wouldn't know howbright S Doradus was. Or how dim Van Maanen's star was."

  "Then," Fuller said speculatively, "they'd have to wait until one oftheir scientists invented the telectroscope."

  Arcot shook his head. "Without a knowledge of nuclear physics, theinvention of the telectroscope is impossible. The lack of opportunity towatch the stars that might teach them something would delay theirknowledge of atomic structure. They might learn a great deal aboutchemistry and Newtonian physics, and go quite a ways with math, but eventhere they would be handicapped. Morey, for instance, would never havedeveloped the autointegral calculus, to say nothing of tensor and spinorcalculus, which were developed two hundred years ago, without theknowledge of the problems of space to develop the need. I'm afraid sucha race would be quite a bit behind us in science.

  "Suppose, on the other hand, we visit a race that's far ahead of us.We'd better not stay there long; think what they might do to us. Theymight decide our ship was too threatening and simply wipe us out. Orthey might even be so far advanced that we would mean nothing to them atall--like ants or little squalling babies." Arcot laughed at thethought.

  "That isn't a very complimentary picture," objected Fuller. "With thewonderful advances we've made, there just isn't that much left to beable to say we're so little."

  "Fuller, I'm surprised at you!" Arcot said. "Today, we are only openingour eyes on the world of science. Our race has only a few thousand yearsbehind it and hundreds of millions yet to come. How can any man oftoday, with his freshly-opened eyes of science, take in the mightypyramid of knowledge that will be built up in those long, long years ofthe future? It's too gigantic to grasp; we can't imagine the things
thatthe ever-expanding mind of man will discover."

  Arcot's voice slowed, and a far-off look came in his eyes.

  "You might say there can be no greater energy than that of matterannihilation. I doubt that. I have seen hints of something new--anenergy so vast--so transcendently tremendous--that it frightens me. Theenergies of all the mighty suns of all the galaxies--of the wholecosmos--in the hand of man! The energy of a billion billion billionsuns! And every sun pouring out its energy at the rate of quintillionsof horsepower every instant!

  "But it's too great for man to have--I am going to forget it, lest manbe destroyed by his own might."

  Arcot's halting speech told of his intense thought--of a dream of suchawful energies as man had never before conceived. His eyes lookedunseeing at the black velvet of space with its few, scattered stars.

  "But we're here to decide which way to go," he added with a suddenbriskness as he straightened his shoulders. "Every now and then, I get anew idea and I--I sort of dream. That's when I'm most likely to see thesolution. I think I know the solution now, but unless the need arises,I'm never going to use it. It's too dangerous a toy."

  There was silence for a moment, then Morey said, quietly:

  "I've got a course plotted for us. We'll leave this Galaxy at a steepangle--about forty-five degrees from the Galactic plane--to give us agood view of our own Galaxy. And we can head for one of the nebulae inthat general area. What do you say?"

  "I say," remarked Fuller, "that some of the great void without seems tohave leaked into my own poor self. It's been thirty thousand years sinceI am going to have a meal this morning--whatever it is I mean--and Iwant another." He looked meaningfully at Wade, the official cook of theexpedition.

  Arcot suddenly burst out laughing. "So that's what I've been wanting!"It had been ten chronometer hours since they had eaten, but since theyhad been outracing light, they were now thirty thousand years in Earth'spast.

  The weightlessness of free fall makes it difficult to recognize normallyfamiliar sensations, and the feeling of hunger is one of them. There waslittle enough work to be done, so there was no great need fornourishment, but the ordinary sensation of hunger is not caused by lackof nourishment, but an empty stomach.

  Sleep was another problem. A restless body will not permit a tired brainto sleep, and though they had done a great deal of hard mental work, thelack of physical fatigue made sleep difficult. The usual "day" in spacewas forty hours, with thirty-hour waking periods and ten hours of sleep.

  "Let's eat, then," Arcot decided. "Afterwards, we'll take a fewphotographs and then throw this ship into high and really make time."

  * * * * *

  Two hours later, they were again seated at the control board. Arcotreached out and threw the red switch. "I'm going to give her half powerfor ten seconds." The air about them seemed suddenly snapping withunprecedented power--then it was gone as the coil became fully charged.

  "Lucky we shielded those relays," Arcot muttered. The tremendous surgeof current set up a magnetic field that turned knives and forks and, asWade found to his intense disgust, stopped watches that were notmagnetically shielded.

  Space was utterly black about them now; there wasn't the slightest hintof light. The ten seconds that Arcot had allowed dragged slowly. Then atlast came the heavy crashing of the huge relays; the current flowed backinto the storage coils, and space became normal again. They were alonein the blackness.

  Morey dove swiftly for the observatory. Before them, there was little tosee; the dim glow of nebulae millions of light years away was scarcelyvisible to the naked eye, despite the clarity of space.

  Behind them, like a shining horizon, they saw the mass of the Galaxy forthe first time as free observers.

  Morey began to make swift calculations of the distance they had come bymeasuring the apparent change in diameter of the Galaxy.

  Arcot floated into the room after him and watched as Morey made hisobservations and began to work swiftly with pencil and paper. "What doyou make?" Arcot asked.

  "Mmmmm. Let's see." Morey worked a moment with his slide rule. "We madegood time! Twenty-nine light years in ten seconds! You had it on at halfpower--the velocity goes up as the cube of the power--doubling thepower, then, gives us eight times the velocity--Hmmmmmm." He readjustedthe slide rule and slid the hairline over a bit. "We can make tenmillion light years in a little less than five days at full power.

  "But I suggest we make another stop in six hours. That will put us aboutfive radii, or half a million light years from the Galaxy. We'll need totake some more photographs to help us retrace our steps to Earth."

  "All right, Morey," Arcot agreed. "It's up to you. Get your photos hereand we'll go on. By the way, I think you ought to watch the instrumentsin the power room; this will be our first test at full power. We figuredwe'd make twenty light years per second, and it looks as if it's goingto be closer to twenty-four."

  A few minutes later, Arcot seated himself at the control board andflipped on the intercom to the power room. "All ready, Morey? I justhappened to think--it might be a good idea to pick out our galaxy nowand start toward it."

  "Let's wait," cautioned Morey. "We can't make a very careful choice atthis distance, anyway; we're beyond the enlarging power range of thetelectroscope here. In another half million light years, we'll have amuch better view, and that comparatively short distance won't take usmuch out of our way."

  "Wait a minute," said Fuller. "You say we're beyond the magnificationrange of the telectroscope. Then why would half a million light yearsout of ten million make that much difference?"

  "Because of the limit of amplification in the tubes," Arcot replied."You can only have so many stages of amplification; after that, you'reamplifying noise. The whole principle of the vacuum tube depends onelectronic emission; if you get _too much_ amplification, you can hearevery single electron striking the plate of the first tube by the timethe thing reaches the last amplifying stage! In other words, if yourincoming signal is weaker than the minimum noise level on the firstamplifying stage, no amount of amplification will give you anything butmore noise.

  "The same is true of the telectroscope image. At this distance, thelight signal from those galaxies is weaker than the noise level. We'donly get a flickering, blurred image. But if we go on another halfmillion light years, the light signal from the nearer nebulae will be_stronger_ than the base noise level, and full amplification will giveus a good image on the screen."

  Fuller nodded. "Okay, then let's go that additional half million lightyears. I want to take a look at another galaxy."

  "Right." Arcot turned to the intercom. "Ready, Morey?"

  "Anytime you are."

  "Here goes!" said Arcot. He pushed over the little red control.

  At full power, the air filled with the strain of flowing energy andactually broke down in spots with the terrific electrical energy of thecharge. There were little snapping sparks in the air, which, thoughharmless electrically, were hot enough to give slight burns, as Wadefound to his sorrow.

  "Yike! Say, why didn't you tell us to bring lightning rods?" he askedindignantly as a small spark snapped its way over his hand.

  "Sorry," grinned Arcot, "but most people know enough to stay out of theway of those things. Seriously, though, I didn't think the electrostaticcurvature would be so slow to adjust. You see, when we build up ourlight-rate distortion field, other curvatures are affected. We get somegravity, some magnetic, and some electrostatic field distortion, too.You can see what happens when they don't leak their energy back into thecoil.

  "But we're busy with the instruments; leave the motorman alone!"

  Morey was calling loudly for tests. Although the ship seemed to bebehaving perfectly, he wanted check tests to make sure the relays werenot being burned, which would keep them from responding properly. Byrerouting the current around each relay, Arcot checked them one by one.

  It was just as they had finished testing the last one that Fulleryelled. r />
  "Hey! _Look!_" He pointed out the broad viewport in the side of theship.

  Far off to their left and far to their right, they saw two shining shipsparalleling their course. They were shining, sleek ships, their long,longitudinal windows glowing with white light. They seemed to be movingat exactly the same speed, holding grimly to the course of the _AncientMariner_. They bracketed the ship like an official guard, despite theterrific velocity of the Earthmen's ship.

  Arcot stared in amazement, his face suddenly clouded in wonder. Morey,who had come up from the power room, stared in equal wonder.

  Quickly, Wade and Fuller slid into the ray control seats. Their longpractice with the rays had made them dead shots, and they had beenchosen long before as the ship's official ray operators.

  "Lord," muttered Morey as he looked at the ships, "where can they havecome from?"