E.E. 'Doc' Smith SF Gateway Omnibus: The Skylark of Space, Skylark Three, Skylark of Valeron, Skylark DuQuesne (77 page)

‘I don’t know yet whether I can or not – that’s another question. We already know, though, how to set up a stasis of the ether along a spherical surface, and after I have accumulated a little more data on the sixth order it should not be impossible to calculate a volume-stasis in both ether and subether, far enough down to establish complete immobility and local cessation of time in gross matter so affected.’

‘But would not all matter so affected assume at once the
absolute zero of temperature and thus preclude life?’

‘I don’t think so. The stasis would be subatomic and instantaneous, you know; there could be no loss or transfer of energy. I don’t see how gross matter could be affected at all. As far as I can see it would be an absolutely perfect suspension of animation. You and Dot lived through it, anyway, and I’m positive that that’s what they did to you. And I still say that if anybody can do it, we can.’

‘“And that,”’ put in Margaret roguishly, ‘as you so feelingly remark, “is a cheerful thought to dwell on – let’s dwell on it!”’

‘We’ll do that little thing, too, Peg, some of these times; see if we don’t!’ Seaton promised. ‘But to get back to our knitting, what’s the good word, Mart – located us yet? Are we, or are we not, heading for that justly famed “distant galaxy” of the Fenachrone?’

‘We are not,’ Crane replied flatly, ‘nor are we heading for any other point in space covered by the charts of Ravindau’s astronomers.’

‘Huh? Great Cat!’ Seaton joined the physicist at his visiplate, and made complete observations upon the brightest nebulae visible.

He turned then to the charts, and his findings confirmed those of Crane. They were so far away from our own galaxy that the space in which they were was unknown, even to those masters of astronomy and of intergalactic navigation, the Fenachrone.

‘Well, we’re not lost, anyway, thanks to your cautious old bean.’ Seaton grinned as he stepped over to an object-compass mounted upon the plane table.

This particular instrument was equipped with every refinement known to the science of four great solar systems. Its exceedingly delicate needle, swinging in an almost-perfect vacuum upon practically frictionless jeweled bearings, was focused upon the unimaginable mass of the entire First Galaxy, a mass so inconceivably great that mathematics had shown – and even Crane would have stated as a fact – that it would affect that needle from any point whatever, however distant in macrocosmic space.

Seaton actuated the minute force which set the needle in motion, but it did not oscillate. For minute after minute it revolved slowly but freely, coming ultimately to rest without any indication of having been affected in the least by any external influence. He stared at the compass in stark, unbelieving amazement, then tested its current and its every other factor. The instrument was in perfect order and in perfect adjustment. Grimly, quietly, he repeated the oscillatory test – with the same utterly negative result.

‘Well, that is eminently, conclusively, definitely, and unqualifiedly that.’ He stared at Crane, unseeing, his mind racing. ‘The most sensitive needle we’ve got, and she won’t even register!’

‘In other words, we are lost.’ Crane’s voice was level and calm.
‘We are so far away from the First Galaxy that even that compass, supposedly reactive from any possible location in space, is useless.’

‘But I don’t get it, at all, Mart!’ Seaton exclaimed, paying no attention to the grim meaning underlying his friend’s utterance. ‘With the whole mass of the galaxy as its object of attachment that needle absolutely will register from a distance greater than any possible diameter of the super-universe …’ His voice died away.

‘Go on; you are beginning to see the light,’ Crane prompted.

‘Yeah – no wonder I couldn’t plot a curve to trace those Fenachrone torpedoes – our fundamental assumptions were unsound. The fact simply is that if space is curved at all, the radius of curvature is vastly greater than any figure as yet proposed, even by the Fenachrone astronomers. We certainly weren’t out of our own space a thousandth of a second – more likely only a couple of millionths – do you suppose that there really are folds in the fourth dimension?’

‘That idea has been advanced, but folds are not strictly necessary, nor are they easy to defend. It has always seemed to me that the hypothesis of linear departure is much more tenable. The planes need not be parallel, you know – in fact, it is almost a mathematical certainty that they are
not
parallel.’

‘That’s so, too; and that hypothesis would account for everything of course. But how are—’

‘What
are
you two talking about?’ demanded Dorothy. ‘We simply couldn’t have come that far – why, the
Skylark
was stuck in the ground the whole time!’

‘As a physicist, Red-Top, you’re a fine little beauty-contest winner.’ Seaton grinned. ‘You forget that with the velocity she had, the
Lark
wouldn’t have been stopped within three months, either – yet she seemed to stop. How about that, Mart?’

‘I have been thinking about that. It is all a question of relative velocities, of course; but even at that, the angle of departure of the two spaces must have been extreme indeed to account for our present location in three-dimensional space.’

‘Extreme is right; but there’s no use yapping about it now, any more than about any other spilled milk. We’ll just have to go places and do things; that’s all.’

‘Go where and do what?’ asked Dorothy pointedly.

‘Lost – lost in space!’ Margaret breathed.

As the dread import of their predicament struck into her consciousness she had seized the arm rests of her chair in a spasmodic clutch; but she forced herself to relax and her deep brown eyes held no sign of panic.

‘But we have been lost in space before, Dottie, apparently as badly as we are now. Worse, really, because we did not have
Martin and Dick with us then.’

‘At-a-girl, Peg!’ Seaton cheered. ‘We may be lost – guess we are, temporarily, at least – but we’re not licked, not by seven thousand rows of apple trees!’

‘I fail to perceive any very solid basis for your optimism,’ Crane remarked quietly, ‘but you have an idea, of course. What is it?’

‘Pick out the galaxy nearest our line of flight and brake down for it.’ Seaton’s nimble mind was leaping ahead. ‘The
Lark
’s so full of uranium that her skin’s bulging, so we’ve got power to burn. In that galaxy there are – there
must
be – suns with habitable, possibly inhabited, planets. We’ll find one such planet and land on it. Then we’ll do with our might what our hands find to do.’

‘Such as?’

‘Along what lines?’ queried Dorothy and Crane simultaneously.

‘Spaceship, probably –
Two
’s entirely too small to be of any account in intergalactic work,’ Seaton replied promptly. ‘Or maybe fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-order projectors; or maybe some kind of an ultra-ultra radio or projector. How do I know, from here? But there’s thousands of things that maybe we can do – we’ll wait until we get there to worry about which one to try first.’

Seaton strode over to the control board and applied maximum acceleration. ‘Might as well start traveling, Mart,’ he remarked to Crane, who for almost an hour had been devoting the highest telescopic power of number six visiplate to spectroscopic, interferometric, and spectrophotometric studies of half a dozen selected nebulae. ‘No matter which one you pick out we’ll have to have quite a lot of positive acceleration yet before we reverse to negative.’

‘As a preliminary measure, might it not be a good plan to gain some idea as to our present line of flight?’ Crane asked dryly, bending a quizzical glance upon his friend. ‘You know a great deal more than I do about the hypothesis of linear departure of incompatible and incommensurable spaces, however, and so perhaps you already know our true course.’

‘Ouch! Pals, they got me!’ Seaton clapped a hand over his heart; then, seizing his own ear, he led himself up to the switchboard and shut off the space drive, except for the practically negligible superimposed thirty-two feet per second which gave to the
Skylark
’s occupants a normal gravitational force.

‘Why, Dick, how perfectly silly!’ Dorothy chuckled. ‘What’s the matter? All you’ve got to do is …’

‘Silly, says you?’ Seaton, still blushing, interrupted her. ‘Woman, you don’t know the half of it! I’m just plain dumb, and Mart was tactfully
calling my attention to the fact. Them’s soft words that the slat-like string bean just spoke, but believe me, Red-Top, he packs a wicked wallop in that silken glove!’

‘Keep still a minute, Dick, and look at the bar!’ Dorothy protested. ‘Everything’s on zero, so we must still be going straight up, and all you have to do to get us back somewhere near our own galaxy is to turn it around. Why didn’t one of you brilliant thinkers – or have I overlooked a bet?’

‘Not exactly. You don’t know about those famous linear departures, but I do. I haven’t that excuse – I simply went off halfcocked again. You see, it’s like this: even if those gyroscopes retained their orientation unchanged through the fourth-dimensional translation, which may or may not be the case, that line wouldn’t mean a thing as far as getting back is concerned.

‘We took one gosh-awful jump in going through hyperspace, you know, and we have no means at all of determining whether we jumped up, down, or sidewise. Nope, he’s right, as usual – we can’t do anything intelligently until he finds out, from the shifting of spectral lines and so on, in what direction we actually are traveling. How’re you coming with it, Mart?’

‘For really precise work we shall require photographs, but I have made six preliminary observations, as nearly on rectangular coordinates as possible, from which you can calculate a first-approximation course which will serve until we can obtain more precise data. Here are my rough notes upon the spectra.’

‘All right, while you’re taking your pictures I’ll run them off on the calculator. From the looks of those shifts I’d say I could hit our course within five degrees, which is close enough for a few days, at least.’

Seaton soon finished his calculations. He then read off from the great graduated hour- and declination-circles of the gyroscope cage the course upon which the power-bar was then set, and turned with a grin to Crane, who had just opened the shutter for his first time exposure.

‘We were off plenty, Mart,’ he admitted. ‘About ninety degrees minus declination and something like plus seven hours’ right ascension, so we’ll have to forget all our old data and start right from scratch. That won’t hurt us much, though, since we haven’t any idea where we are, anyway.

‘We’re heading about ten degrees or so to the right of that nebula over there, which is certainly a mighty long ways off from where I thought we were going. I’ll put on full positive and point ten degrees to the left of it. Probably you’d better read it now, and by taking a set of observations, say a hundred hours apart, we can figure when we’ll have to reverse acceleration.

‘While you’re doing that I thought I’d start seeing what I could do about a fourth-order projector. It’ll take a long time to build, and we’ll need one bad when we get inside that galaxy. What do you think?’

‘I think that both of those ideas are sound,’ Crane assented, and each man
bent to his task.

Crane took his photographs and studied each of the six key nebulae with every resource of his ultra-refined instruments. Having determined the
Skylark
’s course and speed, and knowing her acceleration, he was able at last to set upon the power-bar an automatically varying control of such a nature that her resultant velocity was directly toward the lenticular nebula nearest her line of flight.

That done, he continued his observations at regular intervals – constantly making smaller his limit of observational error, constantly so altering the power and course of the vessel that the selected galaxy would be reached in the shortest possible space of time consistent with a permissible final velocity.

And in the meantime Seaton labored upon the projector. It had been out of the question, of course, to transfer to tiny
Two
the immense mechanism which had made of
Three
a sentient, almost living, thing; but, equally of course, he had brought along the force-band transformers and selectors, and as much as possible of the other essential apparatus. He had been obliged to leave behind, however, the very heart of the fifth-order installation – the precious lens of neutronium – and its lack was now giving him deep concern.

‘What the matter, Dickie? You look as though you had lost your best friend.’ Dorothy intercepted him one day as he paced about the narrow confines of the control room, face set and eyes unseeing.

‘Not quite that, but ever since I finished that fourth-order outfit I’ve been trying to figure out something to take the place of that lens we had in
Three
, so that I can go ahead on the fifth, but that seems to be one thing for which there is absolutely no substitute. It’s like trying to unscrew the inscrutable – it can’t be done.’

‘If you can’t get along without it, why didn’t you bring it along, too?’

‘Couldn’t.’

‘Why?’ she persisted.

‘Nothing strong enough to hold it. In some ways it’s worse than atomic energy. It’s so hot and under such pressure that if that lens were to blow up in Omaha it would burn up the whole United States, from San Francisco to New York City. It takes either thirty feet of solid inoson or else a complete force-bracing to stand the pressure. We had neither, no time to build anything, and couldn’t have taken it through hyperspace even if we could have held it safely.’

‘Does that mean …’

‘No. It simply means that we’ll have to start at the fourth again and work up. I did bring along a couple of good big faidons, so that all we’ve got to do is find a planet heavy enough and solid enough to
anchor a full-sized fourth-order projector on, within twenty light-years of a white dwarf star.’

‘Oh, is that all? You two’ll do that, all right.’

‘Ain’t it wonderful, the confidence some women have in their husbands?’ Seaton asked Crane, who was studying through number six visiplate and the fourth-order projector the enormous expanse of the strange galaxy at whose edge they now were. ‘I think maybe we’ll be able to pull it off, though, at that. Of course we aren’t close enough yet to find such minutiae as planets, but how are things shaping up in general?’