"I think you"re right," agreed Morey. "Besides, that will give us a wider 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. They watched the green image of the white dwarf fade and then suddenly flare up and become bright again as they outraced the light that had left it five 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 the star was merely a dim point, almost lost in the myriad of stars around it.
Then out to the edge of the galaxy they went, out toward their own universe.
"Arcot," Morey called, "let"s go out, say one million light years into s.p.a.ce, at an angle to this galaxy, and see if we can get both galaxies on one plate. It will make navigation between them easier."
"Good idea. We can get out and back in one day--and this "time" won"t count back on Earth, anyway." Since they would travel in the s.p.a.ce-strain all the time, it would not count as Earth time.
Arcot pushed the red control all the way forward, and the ship began to move at its top velocity of twenty-four light years per second. The hours dragged heavily, as they had when they were coming in, and Arcot remained alone on watch while the others went to their rooms for some sleep, strapping their weightless bodies securely in the bunks.
It was hours later when Morey awoke with a sudden premonition of trouble. He looked at the chronometer on the wall--he had slept twelve hours! They had gone beyond the million light year mark! It didn"t matter, except it showed that something had happened to Arcot.
Something had. Arcot was sound asleep in the middle of the library--exactly in the middle, floating in the room ten feet from each wall.
Morey called out to him, and Arcot awoke with a guilty start. "A fine sentry you make," said Morey caustically. "Can"t even keep awake when all 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 still going strong. Come on--snap out of it!"
"I"m sorry--I apologize--I know I shouldn"t have slept, but it was so perfectly quiet here except for your deep-toned, musical snores that I couldn"t help it," grinned Arcot. "Get me down from here and we"ll stop."
"Get you down, nothing!" Morey snapped. "You stay right there while I call 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 on their way to wake up Fuller, when suddenly the air of the ship crackled around them! The s.p.a.ce was changing! They were coming out of hypers.p.a.ce!
In amazement, Morey and Wade looked at each other. They knew that Arcot was 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 under four gravities of acceleration! Unable to walk, they could only crawl laboriously toward the control room, calling to Arcot to shut off the power.
When Morey had left him stranded in the library, Arcot had decided it was high time he got to the floor. Quickly, he looked around for a means of doing so. Near him, floating in the air, was the book he had been reading, but it was out of reach. He had taken off his boots when he started to read, so the Fuller rocket method was out. It seemed hopeless.
Then, suddenly, came the inspiration! Quickly, he slipped off his shirt and began waving it violently in the air. He developed a velocity of about two inches a second--not very fast, but fast enough. By the time he 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 the corridor and into the control room without being seen by Morey, who was in Wade"s room.
Just as Wade and Morey reached the doorway to the control room, Arcot decided it was time to shut the power off. Both of the men, laboring under more than eight hundred pounds of weight, were suddenly weightless. All the strength of their powerful muscles were expended in hurling them against the far wall.
The complaints were loud, but they finally simmered down to an earnest demand to know how in the devil Arcot had managed to get off dead center.
"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 to the 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 system secret, it seemed.
"At any rate," Arcot continued, "I am back in the control room, where I belong, and you are not in the observatory where you belong. Now get out of 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. We still can"t get both galaxies on the same plate. Let"s go on for another hour and take our pictures from that point."
Fuller had awakened and come in in the meantime, and he wanted to know why they didn"t take some pictures from this spot.
"No point in it," said Morey. "We have the ones we took coming in; what we want is a wide-angle shot."
Arcot threw on the s.p.a.ce-strain drive once more, and they headed on at top speed.
They were all in the control room, watching the instruments and joking--princ.i.p.ally the latter--when it happened. One instant they were moving smoothly, weightlessly along. The next instant, the ship rocked as though it had been struck violently! The air was a snapping inferno of shooting sparks, and there came the sharp crash of the suddenly volatilized silver bar that was their main power fuse. Simultaneously, they were hurled forward with terrific force; the straps that held them in place creaked with the sudden strain, and the men felt weak and faint.
Consciousness nearly left them; they had been burned in a dozen places by 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 the dim glowing of the galaxies.
"Brother! We came near something!" Arcot cried. "It may be a wandering star! Take a look around, quick!"
But the dark of s.p.a.ce seemed utterly empty around them as they coasted weightless through s.p.a.ce. Then Arcot snapped off the lights of the control room, and in a moment his eyes had become accustomed to the dim lights.
It was dead ahead of them. It was a dull red glow, so dim it was scarcely visible. Arcot realized it was a dead star.
"There it is, Morey!" he said. "A dead star, directly ahead of us! Good G.o.d, 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 distance recorded 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 hope to avoid that thing; we haven"t got the power. I"m going to try for an orbit around it. We"ll fall toward it and give the ship all the acceleration she"ll take. There"s no time to calculate--I"ll just pile on the speed until we don"t fall into it."
The others, strapped into the control chairs, prepared themselves for the acceleration to come.
If the _Ancient Mariner_ had dropped toward the star from an infinite distance, Arcot could have applied enough power to put the ship in a hyperbolic orbit which would have carried them past the star. But they had come in on the s.p.a.ce drive, and had gotten fairly close before the gravitational field had drained the power from the main coil, and it was not until the s.p.a.ce field had broken that they had started to accelerate toward the star. Their velocity would not be great enough to form an escape orbit.
Even now, they would fall far short of enough velocity to get into an elliptical orbit unless they used the molecular drive.