The elder Dr. Arcot glanced in surprise at the heavy-duty ammeter in a control panel.
"Half a billion amperes! Good Lord! Where is all that power going?" He looked at his son.
"Into the storage coils. It"s going in at ten kilovolts, so that"s a five billion kilowatt supply. It"s been going for half an hour and has half an hour to run. It takes two tons of matter to charge the coil to capacity, and we"re carrying twenty tons of fuel--enough for ten charges. 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 black cylinder nearly two feet in diameter and extending out through the wall in the rear. It was made integral with two giant lux metal beams that reached to the bow of the ship in a long, sweeping curve. From one of the power switchboards, two heavy cables ran up to the giant cylinder.
"That"s the main horizontal power unit. We can develop an acceleration of 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 other two 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 was occupied by a heavy pedestal of lux metal upon which was a huge, relux-encased, double torus storage coil. There was a large switchboard at the opposite end, while around the room, in ordered groups, stood the familiar double coils, each five feet in diameter. The s.p.a.ce within them was 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 one for?"
"That"s the main s.p.a.ce control," the younger Arcot answered. "While our power is stored in the smaller ones, we can shoot it into this one, which, you will notice, is constructed slightly differently. Instead of holding the field within it, completely enclosed, the big one will affect all the s.p.a.ce about it. We will then be enclosed in what might be called a hypers.p.a.ce of our own making."
"I see," said his father. "You go into hypers.p.a.ce and move at any speed you 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"re in that hypers.p.a.ce. We"ll simply aim the ship in the direction we want to go and then go into hypers.p.a.ce. The only thing we have to avoid is stars; their gravitational fields would drain the energy out of the apparatus and we"d end up in the center of a white-hot star. Meteors and such, we don"t have to worry about; their fields aren"t strong enough to drain the coils, and since we won"t be in normal s.p.a.ce, we can"t hit them."
The elder Morey looked worried. "If you can"t see your way back you"ll get lost! And you can"t radio back for help."
"Worse than that!" said Arcot. "We couldn"t receive a signal of any kind after we get more than three hundred light years away; there weren"t any radios before that.
"What we"ll do is locate ourselves through the sun"s light. We"ll take photographs every so often and orient ourselves by them when we come back."
"That sounds like an excellent method of stellar navigation," agreed Morey senior. "Let"s see the rest of the ship." He turned and walked toward the farther door.
The next room was the laboratory. On one side of the room was a complete physics lab and on the other was a well-stocked and well-equipped chemistry lab. They could perform many experiments here that no man had been able to perform due to lack of power. In this ship they had more generating facilities than all the power stations of Earth combined!
Arcot opened the next door. "This next room is the physics and chemistry storeroom. Here we have a duplicate--in some cases, six or seven duplicates--of every piece of apparatus on board, and plenty of material to make more. Actually, we have enough equipment to make a new ship out of what we have here. It would be a good deal smaller, but it would work.
"The greater part of our materials is stored in the curvature of the ship, where it will be easy to get at if necessary. All our water and food 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 small rooms on each side of the corridor down the center; at the extreme nose was the control room, and at the extreme stern was the observatory. The observatory was equipped with a small but exceedingly powerful telectroscope, developed from those the Nigrans had left on one of the deserted planets Sol had captured in return for the loss of Pluto to the Black Star. The arc commanded by the instrument was not great, but it was easy to turn the ship about, and most of their observations could be made without trouble.
Each of the men had a room of his own; there was a small galley and a library equipped with all the books the four men could think of as being useful. The books and all other equipment were clamped in place to keep them from flying around loose when the ship accelerated.
The control room at the nose was surrounded by a hemisphere of transparent lux metal which enabled them to see in every direction except directly behind, and even that blind spot could be covered by stationing a man in the observatory.
There were heat projectors and molecular ray projectors, each operated from the control room in the nose. To complete the armament, there were more projectors in the stern, controlled from the observatory, and a set on either side controlled from the library and the galley.
The ship was provisioned for two years--two years without stops. With the possibility of stopping on other planets, the four men could exist indefinitely in the ship.
After the two older men had been shown all through the intergalactic vessel, the elder Arcot turned to his old friend. "Morey, it looks as if it 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 know there"s a lot more I could say." Morey senior looked at them and started toward the airlock.
"Goodbye, son," said the elder Arcot. "Goodbye, men. I"ll be expecting you any time within two years. We can have no warning, I suppose; your ship will outrace the radio beam. Goodbye." Dr. Arcot joined his old friend and they went outside.
The heavy lux metal door slid into place behind them, and the thick plastic cushions sealed the entrance to the airlock.
The workmen and the other personnel around the ship cleared the area and stood well back from the great hull. The two older men waved to the men inside the ship.
Suddenly the ship trembled, and rose toward the sky.
V
Arcot, at the controls of the _Ancient Mariner_, increased the acceleration as the ship speared up toward interplanetary s.p.a.ce. Soon, the deep blue of the sky had given way to an intense violet, and this faded to the utter black of s.p.a.ce as the ship drew away from the planet that was its home.
"That lump of dust there is going to look mighty little when we get back," said Wade softly.
"But," Arcot reminded him, "that little lump of dust is going to pull us across a distance that our imaginations can"t conceive of. And we"ll be darned happy to see that pale globe swinging in s.p.a.ce when we get back--provided, of course, that we do get back."
The ship was straining forward now under the pull of its molecular motion power units, accelerating at a steady rate, rapidly increasing the distance between the ship and Earth.
The cosmic ray power generators were still charging the coils, preventing the use of the s.p.a.ce strain drive. Indeed, it would be a good many hours before they would be far enough from the sun to throw the ship into hypers.p.a.ce.
In the meantime, Morey was methodically checking every control as Arcot called out the readings on the control panel. Everything was working to perfection. Their every calculation had checked out in practice so far.
But the real test was yet to come.
They were well beyond the orbit of Pluto when they decided they would be safe in using the s.p.a.ce strain drive and throwing the ship into hypers.p.a.ce.
Morey was in the hypers.p.a.ce control room, watching the instruments there. They were ready!
"Hold on!" called Arcot. "Here we go--if at all!" He reached out to the control panel before him and touched the green switch that controlled the molecular motion machines. The big power tubes cut off, and their acceleration ceased. His fingers pushed a brilliant red switch--there was a dull, m.u.f.fled thud as a huge relay snapped shut.
Suddenly, a strange tingling feeling of power ran through them--s.p.a.ce around them was suddenly black. The lights dimmed for an instant as the t.i.tanic current that flowed through the gigantic conductors set up a terrific magnetic field, reacting with the absorption plates. The power seemed to climb rapidly to a maximum--then, quite suddenly, it was gone.
The ship was quiet. No one spoke. The meters, which had flashed over to their limits, had dropped back to zero once more, except those which indicated the power stored in the giant coil. The stars that had shone brilliantly around them in a myriad of colors were gone. The s.p.a.ce around them glowed strangely, and there was a vast cloud of strange, violet or pale green stars before them. Directly ahead was one green star that glowed big and brilliant, then it faded rapidly and shrank to a tiny dot--a distant star. There was a strange tenseness about the men; they seemed held in an odd, compelled silence.
Arcot reached forward again. "Cutting off power, Morey!" The red tumbler snapped back. Again s.p.a.ce seemed to be charged with a vast surplus of energy that rushed in from all around, coursing through their bodies, producing a tingling feeling. Then s.p.a.ce rocked in a gray cloud about them; the stars leaped out at them in blazing glory again.
"Well, it worked once!" breathed Arcot with a sigh of relief. "Lord, I made some errors in calculation, though! I hope I didn"t make any more!
Morey--how was it? I only used one-sixteenth power."
"Well, don"t use any more, then," said Morey. "We sure traveled! The things worked perfectly. By the way, it"s a good thing we had all the relays magnetically shielded; the magnetic field down here was so strong that my pocket kit tried to start running circles around it.
"According to your magnetic drag meter, the conductors were carrying over fifty billion amperes. The small coils worked perfectly. They"re charged again; the power went back into them from the big coil with only a five percent loss of power--about twenty thousand megawatts."