Islands of Space
X
Arcot looked speculatively at the star field in the great broad windowbefore him. "We'll want to find another G-0 sun, naturally, but I don'tthink we ought to go directly from here. If we did, we'd have to do alot of backtracking to get back to this dead star. I suggest we go backto the edge of this galaxy, taking pictures on the way out, so that anyfuture investigators can come in directly. It'll only take a few hours."
"I think you're right," agreed Morey. "Besides, that will give us awider choice of stars to pick our next G-0 from. Let's get going."
Arcot moved the red switch, and the ship shot away at half speed. Theywatched the green image of the white dwarf fade and then suddenly flareup and become bright again as they outraced the light that had left itfive centuries before.
They stopped and took more photographs so that the path could be marked.They stopped every light century until they reached a point where thestar was merely a dim point, almost lost in the myriad of stars aroundit.
Then out to the edge of the galaxy they went, out toward their ownuniverse.
"Arcot," Morey called, "let's go out, say one million light years intospace, at an angle to this galaxy, and see if we can get both galaxieson one plate. It will make navigation between them easier."
"Good idea. We can get out and back in one day--and this 'time' won'tcount back on Earth, anyway." Since they would travel in thespace-strain all the time, it would not count as Earth time.
Arcot pushed the red control all the way forward, and the ship began tomove at its top velocity of twenty-four light years per second. Thehours dragged heavily, as they had when they were coming in, and Arcotremained alone on watch while the others went to their rooms for somesleep, strapping their weightless bodies securely in the bunks.
It was hours later when Morey awoke with a sudden premonition oftrouble. He looked at the chronometer on the wall--he had slept twelvehours! They had gone beyond the million light year mark! It didn'tmatter, except it showed that something had happened to Arcot.
Something had. Arcot was sound asleep in the middle of thelibrary--exactly in the middle, floating in the room ten feet from eachwall.
Morey called out to him, and Arcot awoke with a guilty start. "A finesentry you make," said Morey caustically. "Can't even keep awake whenall you have to do is sit here and see that we don't run into anything.We've gone more than our million light years already, and we're stillgoing strong. Come on--snap out of it!"
"I'm sorry--I apologize--I know I shouldn't have slept, but it was soperfectly quiet here except for your deep-toned, musical snores that Icouldn't help it," grinned Arcot. "Get me down from here and we'llstop."
"Get you down, nothing!" Morey snapped. "You stay right there while Icall the others and we decide what's to be done with a sleeping sentry."
Morey turned and left to wake the others.
He had awakened Wade and told him what had happened, and they were ontheir way to wake up Fuller, when suddenly the air of the ship crackledaround them! The space was changing! They were coming out of hyperspace!
In amazement, Morey and Wade looked at each other. They knew that Arcotwas still floating helplessly in the middle of the room, but--
"Hold on, you brainless apes! We're turning around!" came Arcot's voice,full of suppressed mirth.
Suddenly they were both plastered against the wall of the ship underfour gravities of acceleration! Unable to walk, they could only crawllaboriously toward the control room, calling to Arcot to shut off thepower.
When Morey had left him stranded in the library, Arcot had decided itwas high time he got to the floor. Quickly, he looked around for a meansof doing so. Near him, floating in the air, was the book he had beenreading, but it was out of reach. He had taken off his boots when hestarted to read, so the Fuller rocket method was out. It seemedhopeless.
Then, suddenly, came the inspiration! Quickly, he slipped off his shirtand began waving it violently in the air. He developed a velocity ofabout two inches a second--not very fast, but fast enough. By the timehe had put his shirt back on, he had reached the wall.
After that, it was easy to shoot himself over to the door, out into thecorridor and into the control room without being seen by Morey, who wasin Wade's room.
Just as Wade and Morey reached the doorway to the control room, Arcotdecided it was time to shut the power off. Both of the men, laboringunder more than eight hundred pounds of weight, were suddenlyweightless. All the strength of their powerful muscles were expended inhurling them against the far wall.
The complaints were loud, but they finally simmered down to an earnestdemand to know how in the devil Arcot had managed to get off deadcenter.
"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 tothe 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 systemsecret, it seemed.
"At any rate," Arcot continued, "I am back in the control room, where Ibelong, and you are not in the observatory where you belong. Now get outof 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. Westill can't get both galaxies on the same plate. Let's go on for anotherhour and take our pictures from that point."
Fuller had awakened and come in in the meantime, and he wanted to knowwhy they didn't take some pictures from this spot.
"No point in it," said Morey. "We have the ones we took coming in; whatwe want is a wide-angle shot."
Arcot threw on the space-strain drive once more, and they headed on attop speed.
They were all in the control room, watching the instruments andjoking--principally the latter--when it happened. One instant they weremoving smoothly, weightlessly along. The next instant, the ship rockedas though it had been struck violently! The air was a snapping infernoof shooting sparks, and there came the sharp crash of the suddenlyvolatilized silver bar that was their main power fuse. Simultaneously,they were hurled forward with terrific force; the straps that held themin place creaked with the sudden strain, and the men felt weak andfaint.
Consciousness nearly left them; they had been burned in a dozen placesby 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 thedim glowing of the galaxies.
"Brother! We came near something!" Arcot cried. "It may be a wanderingstar! Take a look around, quick!"
But the dark of space seemed utterly empty around them as they coastedweightless through space. Then Arcot snapped off the lights of thecontrol room, and in a moment his eyes had become accustomed to the dimlights.
It was dead ahead of them. It was a dull red glow, so dim it wasscarcely visible. Arcot realized it was a dead star.
"There it is, Morey!" he said. "A dead star, directly ahead of us! GoodGod, 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 distancerecorded 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 hopeto avoid that thing; we haven't got the power. I'm going to try for anorbit around it. We'll fall toward it and give the ship all theacceleration she'll take. There's no time to calculate--I'll just pileon the speed until we don't fall into it."
The other
s, strapped into the control chairs, prepared themselves forthe acceleration to come.
If the _Ancient Mariner_ had dropped toward the star from an infinitedistance, Arcot could have applied enough power to put the ship in ahyperbolic orbit which would have carried them past the star. But theyhad come in on the space drive, and had gotten fairly close before thegravitational field had drained the power from the main coil, and it wasnot until the space field had broken that they had started to acceleratetoward the star. Their velocity would not be great enough to form anescape orbit.
Even now, they would fall far short of enough velocity to get into anelliptical orbit unless they used the molecular drive.
Arcot headed toward one edge of the star, and poured power into themolecular drive. The ship shot forward under an additional five and ahalf gravities of acceleration. Their velocity had been five thousandmiles per second when they entered hyperspace, and they were swiftlyadding to their original velocity.
They did not, of course, feel the pull of the sun, since they were infree fall in its field; they could only feel the five and a halfgravities of the molecular drive. Had they been able to experience thepull 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 wasforcing the ship on with all the additional power he could get. But heknew that the only hope they had was to get the ship in a closed ellipsearound the star, and a closed ellipse meant that they would be foreverbound to the star as a planet! Helpless, for not even the titanic powerof the _Ancient Mariner_ could enable them to escape!
As the dull red of the dead sun ballooned toward them, Arcot said: "Ithink we'll make an orbit, all right, but we're going to be awfullyclose to the surface of that thing!"
The others were quiet; they merely watched Arcot and the star as Arcotmade swift movements with the controls, doing all he could to establishthem in an orbit that would be fairly safe.
It seemed like an eternity--five and a half gravities of accelerationheld the men in their chairs almost as well as the straps of theantiacceleration units that bound them. When a man weighs better thanhalf a ton, he doesn't feel like moving much.
Fuller whispered to Morey out of the corner of his sagging mouth. "Whaton Earth--I mean, what in Space is that thing? We're within only a fewhundred miles, you said, so it must be pretty small. How could it pullus around like this?"
"It's a dead white dwarf--a 'black dwarf', you might say," Moreyreplied. "As the density of such matter increases, the volume of thestar depends less and less on its temperature. In a dwarf with the massof the sun, the temperature effect is negligible; it's the action of theforces within the electron-nucleon gas which makes up the star thatreigns supreme.
"It's been shown that if a white dwarf--or a black one--is increased inmass, it begins to decrease sharply in volume after a certain point isreached. In fact, no _cold_ star can exist with a volume greater thanabout one and a half times the mass of the sun--as the mass increasesand the pressure goes up, the star shrinks in volume because of thedegenerate matter in it. At a little better than 1.4 times the mass ofthe sun--our sun, I mean: Old Sol--the star would theoretically collapseto a point.
"That has almost happened in this case. The actual limit is when thestar has reached the density of a neutron, and this star hasn'tcollapsed that far by a long shot.
"But that star is only forty kilometers--_or less than twenty-fivemiles_ in diameter!"
It took nearly two hours of careful juggling to get an orbit whichArcot considered reasonably circular.
And when they finally did, Wade looked at the sky above them andshouted: "Say, look! What are all those streaks?"
Arcing up from the surface of the dull red plain below them and goingover the ship, were several dim streaks of light across the sky. One ofthem was brighter than the rest, a bright white streak. The streaksdidn't move; they seemed to have been painted on the sky overhead,glowing bands of unwavering light.
"Those," said Arcot, "are the nebulae. That wide streak is the one wejust left. The bright streak must be a nearby star.
"They look like streaks because we're moving so fast in so small anorbit." He pointed to the red star beneath them. "We're less than twentymiles from the center of that thing! We're almost exactly thirtykilometers from its center, or about ten kilometers from its surface!But, because of it's great mass, our orbital velocity is somethingterrific!
"We're going around that thing better than three hundred times everysecond; 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 howwe'll ever break free. We can't pull away with all the power on thisship. We're trapped!
"Well, I'm worn out from working under all that gravity; let's eat andget some sleep."
"I don't feel like sleeping," said Fuller. "You may call this safe, butit would only take an instant to fall down to the surface of that thingthere." He looked down at their inert, but titanically powerful enemywhose baleful glow seemed even now to be burning their funeral pyre.
"Well," said Arcot, "falling into it and flying off into space are twothings you don't have to worry about. If we started toward it, we'd befalling, and our velocity would increase; as a result, we'd bounce rightback out again. The magnitude of the force required to make us fall intothat sun is appalling! The gravitational pull on us now amounts to aboutfive _billion_ tons, which is equalized by the centrifugal force of ourorbital velocity. Any tendency to change it would be like trying to benda spring with that much resistance.
"We'd require a tremendous force to make us either fall into thatstar--or get away from it.
"To escape, we have to lift this ship out against gravity. That meanswe'd have to lift about five million tons of mass. As we get fartherout, our weight will decrease as the gravitational attraction drops off,but we would need such vast amounts of energy that they are beyond humanconception.
"We have burned up two tons of matter recharging the coils, and are nowusing another two tons to recharge them again. We need at least fourtons to spare, and we only started out with twenty. We simply haven'tgot fuel enough to break loose from this star's gravitational hold, vastas the energy of matter is. Let's eat, and then we can sleep on theproblem."
Wade cooked a meal for them, and they ate in silence, trying to think ofsome way out of their dilemma. Then they tried to sleep on the problem,as Arcot had suggested, but it was difficult to relax. They werephysically tired; they had gone through such great strains, even in theshort time that they had been maneuvering, that they were very tired.
Under a pull five times greater than normal gravity, they had tired inone-fifth the time they would have at one gravity, but their brains werestill wide awake, trying to think of some way--_any way_--to get awayfrom the dark sun.
But at last sleep came.