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

later, they were again seated at the control board. Arcot reached out and threw the red switch. “I’m going to give her half power for ten seconds.” The air about them seemed suddenly snapping with unprecedented power⁠—then it was gone as the coil became fully charged.

“Lucky we shielded those relays,” Arcot muttered. The tremendous surge of current set up a magnetic field that turned knives and forks and, as Wade found to his intense disgust, stopped watches that were not magnetically shielded.

Space was utterly black about them now; there wasn’t the slightest hint of light. The ten seconds that Arcot had allowed dragged slowly. Then at last came the heavy crashing of the huge relays; the current flowed back into the storage coils, and space became normal again. They were alone in the blackness.

Morey dove swiftly for the observatory. Before them, there was little to see; the dim glow of nebulae millions of light years away was scarcely visible to the naked eye, despite the clarity of space.

Behind them, like a shining horizon, they saw the mass of the Galaxy for the first time as free observers.

Morey began to make swift calculations of the distance they had come by measuring the apparent change in diameter of the Galaxy.

Arcot floated into the room after him and watched as Morey made his observations and began to work swiftly with pencil and paper. “What do you make?” Arcot asked.

“Mmmmm. Let’s see.” Morey worked a moment with his slide rule. “We made good time! Twenty-nine light years in ten seconds! You had it on at half power⁠—the velocity goes up as the cube of the power⁠—doubling the power, then, gives us eight times the velocity⁠—Hmmmmmm.” He readjusted the slide rule and slid the hairline over a bit. “We can make ten million light years in a little less than five days at full power.

“But I suggest we make another stop in six hours. That will put us about five radii, or half a million light years from the Galaxy. We’ll need to take some more photographs to help us retrace our steps to Earth.”

“All right, Morey,” Arcot agreed. “It’s up to you. Get your photos here and we’ll go on. By the way, I think you ought to watch the instruments in the power room; this will be our first test at full power. We figured we’d make twenty light years per second, and it looks as if it’s going to be closer to twenty-four.”

A few minutes later, Arcot seated himself at the control board and flipped on the intercom to the power room. “All ready, Morey? I just happened to think⁠—it might be a good idea to pick out our galaxy now and start toward it.”

“Let’s wait,” cautioned Morey. “We can’t make a very careful choice at this distance, anyway; we’re beyond the enlarging power range of the telectroscope here. In another half million light years, we’ll have a much better view, and that comparatively short distance won’t take us much out of our way.”

“Wait a minute,” said Fuller. “You say we’re beyond the magnification range of the telectroscope. Then why would half a million light years out of ten million make that much difference?”

“Because of the limit of amplification in the tubes,” Arcot replied. “You can only have so many stages of amplification; after that, you’re amplifying noise. The whole principle of the vacuum tube depends on electronic emission; if you get too much amplification, you can hear every single electron striking the plate of the first tube by the time the thing reaches the last amplifying stage! In other words, if your incoming signal is weaker than the minimum noise level on the first amplifying stage, no amount of amplification will give you anything but more noise.

“The same is true of the telectroscope image. At this distance, the light signal from those galaxies is weaker than the noise level. We’d only get a flickering, blurred image. But if we go on another half million light years, the light signal from the nearer nebulae will be stronger than the base noise level, and full amplification will give us a good image on the screen.”

Fuller nodded. “Okay, then let’s go that additional half million light years. I want to take a look at another galaxy.”

“Right.” Arcot turned to the intercom. “Ready, Morey?”

“Anytime you are.”

“Here goes!” said Arcot. He pushed over the little red control.

At full power, the air filled with the strain of flowing energy and actually broke down in spots with the terrific electrical energy of the charge. There were little snapping sparks in the air, which, though harmless electrically, were hot enough to give slight burns, as Wade found to his sorrow.

“Yike! Say, why didn’t you tell us to bring lightning rods?” he asked indignantly as a small spark snapped its way over his hand.

“Sorry,” grinned Arcot, “but most people know enough to stay out of the way of those things. Seriously, though, I didn’t think the electrostatic curvature would be so slow to adjust. You see, when we build up our light-rate distortion field, other curvatures are affected. We get some gravity, some magnetic, and some electrostatic field distortion, too. You can see what happens when they don’t leak their energy back into the coil.

“But we’re busy with the instruments; leave the motorman alone!”

Morey was calling loudly for tests. Although the ship seemed to be behaving perfectly, he wanted check tests to make sure the relays were not being burned, which would keep them from responding properly. By rerouting the current around each relay, Arcot checked them one by one.

It was just as they had finished testing the last one that Fuller yelled.

“Hey! Look!” He pointed out the broad viewport in the side of the ship.

Far off to their left and far to their right, they saw two shining ships paralleling their course. They were shining, sleek ships, their long, longitudinal windows glowing with white light. They seemed to be moving at exactly the same speed, holding grimly to the