Islands of Space - John W. Campbell (pdf to ebook reader TXT) 📗

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 space 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 space 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 space about it. We will then be enclosed in what might be called a hyperspace of our own making.”

“I see,” said his father. “You go into hyperspace 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 hyperspace. We’ll simply aim the ship in the direction we want to go and then go into hyperspace. 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 space, 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.

Arcot,