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

course of the Ancient Mariner. They bracketed the ship like an official guard, despite the terrific velocity of the Earthmen’s ship.

Arcot stared in amazement, his face suddenly clouded in wonder. Morey, who had come up from the power room, stared in equal wonder.

Quickly, Wade and Fuller slid into the ray control seats. Their long practice with the rays had made them dead shots, and they had been chosen long before as the ship’s official ray operators.

“Lord,” muttered Morey as he looked at the ships, “where can they have come from?”

VII

Silently, the four men watched the two ships, waiting for any hostile movement. There was a long, tense moment, then something happened for which three of them were totally unprepared.

Arcot burst into sudden laughter.

“Don’t⁠—ho⁠—hoh-ho⁠—oh⁠—don’t shoot!” he cried, laughing so hard it was almost impossible to understand him. “Ohoh⁠—space⁠—curved!” he managed to gasp.

For a moment more, Morey looked puzzled⁠—then he was laughing as hard as Arcot. Helplessly, Wade and Fuller looked at them, then at each other. Then, suddenly, Wade caught the meaning of Arcot’s remark and joined the other two in laughter.

“All right,” said Fuller, still mystified, “when you half-witted physicists recover, please let me in on the joke!” He knew it had something to do with the mysterious ships, so he looked closely at them in hopes that he would get the point, too. When he saw it, he blinked in amazement. “Hey! What is this? Those ships are exact duplicates of the Ancient Mariner!”

“That⁠—that’s what I was laughing at,” Arcot explained, wiping his eyes. “Four big, brave explorers, scared of their own shadows!”

“The light from our own ship has come back to us, due to the intense curvature of the space which encloses us. In normal space, a light ray would take hundreds of millions of years to travel all the way around the Universe and return to its point of origin. Theoretically, it would be possible to photograph our own Galaxy as it was thousands of millennia ago by the light which left it then and has traveled all the way around the curvature of space.

“But our space has such terrific curvature that it only takes a fraction of a second for light to make the trip. It has gone all the way around our little cosmos and come back again.

“If we’d shot at it, we would have really done ourselves in! The ray beam would go around and hit us from behind!”

“Say, that is a nice proposition!” laughed Fuller. “Then we’ll be accompanied by those ghosts all the way? There goes the spirit ‘nine fathoms deep’ which moves the ship⁠—the ghosts that work the sails. This will be a real Ancient Mariner trip!”

It was like that famed voyage in another way, too. The men found little to do as they passed on at high speed through the vast realm of space. The chronometer pointed out the hours with exasperating slowness. The six hours that were to elapse before the first stop seemed as many days. They had thought of this trip as a wonderful adventure in itself, but the soundless continued monotony was depressing. They wandered around, aimlessly. Wade tried to sleep, but after lying strapped in his bunk for half an hour, he gave up in despair.

Arcot saw that the strain of doing nothing was not going to be good for his little crew and decided to see what could be done about it.

He went down to the laboratory and looked for inspiration. He found it.

“Hey! Morey! Wade! Fuller! Come on down here! I’ve got an idea!” he called.

They came to find him looking meditatively at the power pack from one of the flying suits he had designed. He had taken the lux metal case off and was looking at the neat apparatus that lay within.

“These are equipped for use with the space suits, of course,” Morey pointed out, “and that gives us protection against gases. But I wonder if we might install protection against mechanical injury⁠—with intent to damage aforethought! In other words, why not equip these suits with a small invisibility apparatus? We have it on the ship, but we might need personal protection, too.”

“Great idea,” said Wade, “provided you can find room in that case.”

“I think we can. We won’t need to add anything but a few tuning devices, really, and they don’t take a whale of a lot of power.”

Arcot pointed out the places where they could be put; also, he replaced some of the old induction coils with one of his new storage cells and got far higher efficiency from the tubes.

But principally, it was something to do.

Indeed, it was so thoroughly something to do that the six hours had almost elapsed before they realized it. In a very short time, they returned again to the control room and strapped themselves in.

Arcot reached toward the little red switch that controlled the titanic energies of the huge coil below and pulled it back a quarter of the way.

“There go the ghosts!” he said. The images had quickly disappeared, seemingly leaping away from them at terrific speed as the space in which the ship was enclosed opened out more and more and the curvature decreased. They were further away from themselves!

Easing back a quarter at a time, to prevent sparks again flying about in the atmosphere of the ship, Arcot cut the power to zero, and the ship was standing still once more.

They hurriedly dived to the observatory and looked eagerly out the window.

Far, far behind them, floating in the marvelous, soft, utter blackness of space, was a shining disc made up of myriads of glowing points. And it didn’t seem to be a huge thing at a great distance, but simply a small glowing object a few feet outside the window.

So perfectly clear was their view through the lux metal wall and the black, empty space that all sense of distance was lost. It seemed more a miniature model of their universe⁠—a tiny