Islands of Space
XI
Morey thought he was the first to waken when, seven hours later, hedressed and dove lightly, noiselessly, out into the library. Suddenly,he noticed that the telectroscope was in operation--he heard the low humof its smoothly working director motors.
He turned and headed back toward the observatory. Arcot was busy withthe telectroscope.
"What's up, Arcot?" he demanded.
Arcot looked up at him and dusted off his hands. "I've just beengimmicking up the telectroscope. We're going around this dead dwarf onceevery three milliseconds, which makes it awfully hard to see the starsaround us. So I put in a cutoff which will shut the telectroscope offmost of the time; it only looks at the sky once every threemilliseconds. As a result, we can get a picture of what's going onaround us very easily. It won't be a steady picture, but since we'regetting a still picture three hundred times a second, it will be betterthan any moving picture film ever projected as far as accuracy isconcerned.
"I did it because I want to take a look at that bright streak in thesky. 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--whichit most likely is--we can use it to escape. I think I see what you'redriving at."
"If it doesn't work," Arcot said coolly, "we can profit by the exampleof the people we left back there. Suicide is preferable to dying ofcold."
Morey nodded. "The question is: How helpless are we?"
"Depends entirely on 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 adifficult thing to do. It took them well over an hour to get the imagecentered in the screen without its drifting off toward one edge; it tookeven longer to get the focus close enough to a sphere to give them adefinite reading on the instruments. The image had started out as astreak, but by taking smaller and smaller sections of the streak at theproper times, they managed to get a good, solid image. But to get itbright enough was another problem; they were only picking up a fractionof the light, and it had to be amplified greatly to make a visibleimage.
When they finally got what they were looking for, Morey gazed steadilyat the image. "Now the job is to figure the distance. And we haven't gotmuch parallax to work with."
"If we compute in the timing in our blinker system at opposite sides ofthe orbit, I think we can do it," Arcot said.
They went to work on the problem. When Fuller and Wade showed up, theywere given work to do--Morey gave them equations to solve withouttelling them to what the figures applied.
Finally Arcot said: "Their period about the common center of gravity isthirty-nine hours, as I figure it."
Morey nodded. "Check. And that gives us a distance of two million milesapart."
"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 onebeneath us, which is an entirely different matter. If we were midwaybetween this star and that one, the gravitational effects of the twowould be cancelled out, since we would be pulled as hard in onedirection as the other. Then we'd be free of both pulls and couldescape!
"If we could get into that neutral area long enough to turn on our spacestrain drive, we could get away between them fast. Of course, a lot ofour 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 starswhen you don't have enough power to lift this ship a few miles?"
"If Mahomet can not go to the mountain," misquoted Arcot, "then themountain must come to Mahomet."
"What are you going to do?" Wade asked in exasperation. "Beat Joshua? Hemade 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 sucha way that we can escape between the twin fields! We can escape betweenthe hammer and the anvil as millions of millions of millions of tons ofmatter crash into each other."
"And you intend to swing that?" asked Wade in awe as he thought of thespectacle there would be when two suns fell into each other. "Well, Idon'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 arehot. They don't fall into each other because they are rotating abouteach other. Suppose that rotation were stopped--stopped suddenly andcompletely? The molecular ray acts catalytically; we won't supply thepower to stop that star, the star itself will. All we have to do iscause 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 arereally going to hitch our wagon to a star!
"The mechanics of the job are simple. We will have to calculate when andhow long to use the power, and when and how quickly to escape. We'llhave to use the main power board to generate the ray and project itinstead of the little ray units. With luck, we ought to be free of thisstar in three days!"
Work was started at once. They had a chance of life in sight, and theyhad every intention of taking advantage of it! The calculating machinesthey had brought would certainly prove worth their mass in this one use.The observations were extremely difficult because the ship was rocketingaround the star in such a rapid orbit. The calculations of the mass anddistance and orbital motion of the other star were therefore verydifficult, but the final results looked good.
The other star and this one formed a binary, the two being of onlyslightly different mass and rotating about each other at a distance ofroughly two million miles.
The next problem was to calculate the time of fall from that point,assuming that it would stop instantaneously, which would beapproximately true.
The actual fall would take only seven hours under the tremendousacceleration of the two masses! Since the stars would fall toward eachother, the ship would be drawn toward the falling mass, and since theirorbit around the star took only a fraction of a second to complete, theyhad to make sure they were in the right position at the halfway pointjust before collision occurred. Also, their orbit would be greatlyperturbed as the star approached, and it was necessary to calculate thatin, too.
Arcot calculated that in twenty-two hours, forty-six minutes, they wouldbe in the most favorable position to start the fall. They could havestarted sooner, but there were some changes that had to be made in thewiring of the ship before they could start using the molecular ray atfull power.
"Well," said Wade as he finally finished the laborious computations, "Ihope we don't make a mistake and get caught between the two! And whathappens if we find we haven't stopped the star after all?"
"If we don't hit it exactly the first time," Morley replied, "we'll haveto juggle the ray until we do."
They set to work at once, installing the heavy leads to the rayprojectors, which were on the outside of the hull in countersunkrecesses. Morey and Wade had to go outside the ship to help attach thecables.
Out in space, floating about the ship, they were still weightless, forthey, too, were supported by centrifugal force.
The work of readjusting the projectors for greater power was completedin an hour and a quarter, which still left over twenty hours before theycould use them. During the next ten hours, they charged the greatstorage coils to capacity, leaving the circuits to them open, controlledby the relays only. That would keep the coils charged, ready to start.
Finally, Wade dusted off his hands and said: "We're all ready to gomechanically, and I think it would be wise if we were ready physically,too. I know we're not very tired, but if we sit around in suspense we'llbe as nervous as cats when the time comes. I suggest we take a couple ofsleeping tablets and turn in. If we use a mild shock to awaken us, wewon't oversleep."
r /> The others agreed to the plan and prepared for their wait.
Awakened two hours before the actual moment of action, Wade preparedbreakfast, and Morey took observations. He knew just where the starshould be according to their calculations, and looked for it there. Hebreathed a sigh of relief--it was exactly in place! Their mathematicsthey had been sure of, but on such a rapidly moving machine, it wasexceedingly difficult to make good observations.
The two hours seemed to drag interminably, but at last Arcot signalledfor the full power of the molecular rays. They waited, breathlessly, forsome response. Nearly twenty seconds later, the other sun went out.
"We did it!" said Wade in a hushed voice. It was almost a shock torealize that this ship had power enough to extinguish a sun!
Arcot and Morey weren't awed; they didn't have time. There were otherthings to do and do fast.
They had checked the time required for them to see that the white dwarfhad gone out. Half of this gave them the distance from the star in lightseconds.
The screen had already been rigged to flash the information into acomputer, which in turn gave a time signal to the robot pilot that wouldturn on the drive at precisely the right instant. There was no time forhuman error here; the velocities were too great and the time for errortoo small.
Then they waited. They had to wait for seven hours spinning dizzilyaround an improbably tiny star with an equally improbably titanicgravitational field. A star only a couple of dozens of miles across, andyet so dense that it weighed half a million times as much as the Earth!And they had to wait while another star like it, chilled now to absolutezero, fell toward them!
"I wish we could stay around to see the splash," Arcot said. "It's goingto be something to see. All the kinetic energy of those two massesslamming into each other is going to be a blaze of light that willreally be something!"
Wade was looking nervously at the telectroscope plate. "I wish we couldsee that other sun. I don't like the idea of a thing that big creepingup on us in the dark."
"Calm down," Morey said quietly. "It's out of our hands now; we took achance, and it was a chance we _had_ to take. If you want to watchsomething, watch Junior down there. It's going to start doing somepretty interesting tricks."
As the dense black sun approached them, Junior, as Morey had called it,did begin to do tricks. At first they seemed to be optical effects, asthough the eye itself were playing tricks. The red, glowing ball beneaththem began to grow transparent around its surface, leaving an opaque redcore which seemed to be shrinking slowly.
"What's happening?" Fuller asked.
"Our orbit around the star is becoming more and more elliptical," Arcotreplied. "As the other sun pulls us, the star beneath us grows smallerwith the distance; then, as we begin to fall back toward it, it growslarger again. Since this is taking place many hundreds of times persecond, the visual pictures all seem to blend in together."
"Watch the clock," Morey said suddenly, pointing.
The men watched tensely as the hand moved slowly around.
"Ten--nine--eight--seven--six--five--four--three--two--one--ZERO!"
A relay slammed home, and almost instantaneously, everyone on the shipwas slammed into unconsciousness.