Murray Leinster (Duke Classic SiFi) (11 page)

The vast, polished hull of the space-ship slid past them only ten feet
away. The ground diminished. They seemed less to be lifted than to float
skyward. And in this sling, in this completely unreal ascent, Cochrane
roused suddenly. He felt the acute unease which comes of height. He had
looked down upon Earth from a height of four thousand miles with no
feeling of dizziness. He had looked at Earth a quarter-million miles
away with no consciousness of depth. But a mere fifty feet above the
surface of the moon he felt like somebody swinging out of a skyscraper
window.

Then the airlock opening was beside them, and the sling rolled inward.
They were in the lock, and Cochrane found himself pushing Babs away from
the unrailed opening. He was relieved when the airlock closed.

Inside the ship, with the space-suits off, there was light and warmth,
and a remarkably matter-of-fact atmosphere. The ship had been built to
sell stock in a scheme for colonizing Mars. Prospective investors had
been shown through it. It had been designed to be a convincing
passenger-liner of space.

It was. But Cochrane found himself not needed for any consultation, and
Jones was busy, and Bill Holden highly preoccupied. He saw Alicia
Keith—but her name was Simms now. She smiled at him but took Babs by
the arm. They went off somewhere.

Cochrane waited for somebody to tell him what to look at and to admire.
He saw Jamison, and Bell, and he saw a man he had not seen before. He
settled down in a deeply upholstered chair. He felt neglected. Everybody
was busy. But mostly he felt tired.

He slept.

Then Babs was shaking his arm, her eyes shining.

"Mr. Cochrane!" she cried urgently. "Mr. Cochrane! Wake up! Go on up to
the control-room! We're going to take off!"

He blinked at her.

"We!" Then he started up, and went five feet into the air from the
violence of his uncalculated movement. "We? No you don't! You go back to
Lunar City where you'll be safe!"

Then he heard a peculiar drumming, rumbling noise. He had heard it
before. In the moonship. It was rockets being tested; being burned;
rockets in the very last seconds of preparation before take-off for the
stars.

He didn't drop back to the floor beside the chair he'd occupied. The
floor rose to meet him.

"I've had our baggage brought on board," said Babs, happily. "I'm going
because I'm a stockholder! Hold on to something and climb those stairs
if you want to see us go up! I'm going to be busy!"

The physical sensations of ascending to the ship's control-room were
weird in the extreme. Cochrane had just been wakened from a worn-out
sleep, and it was always startling on the moon to wake and find one's
self weighing one-sixth of normal. It took seconds to remember how one
got that way. But on the way up the stairs, Cochrane was further
confused by the fact that the ship was surging this way and swaying
that. It moved above the moon's surface to get over the tilted flat
Dabney field plate on the ground a hundred yards from the ship's
original position.

The Dabney field, obviously, was not in being. The ship hovered on its
rockets. They had been designed to lift it off of Earth—and they
had—against six times the effective gravity here, and with an
acceleration of more gravities on top of that. So the ship rose lightly,
almost skittishly. When gyros turned to make it drift sidewise—as a
helicopter tilts in Earth's atmosphere—it fairly swooped to a new
position. Somebody jockeyed it this way and that.

Cochrane got to the control-room by holding on with both hands to
railings. He was angry and appalled.

The control-room was a hemisphere, with vertical vision-screens
picturing the stars overhead. Jones stood in an odd sort of harness
beside a set of control-switches that did not match the smoothly
designed other controls of the ship. He looked out of a plastic blister,
by which he could see around and below the ship. He made urgent signals
to a man Cochrane had never seen before, who sat in a strap-chair before
many other complex controls with his hands playing back and forth upon
them. A loudspeaker blatted unmusically. It was Dabney's voice, highly
agitated and uneasy.

"
... my work for the advancement of science has been applied by other
minds. I need to specify that if the experiment now about to begin does
not succeed, it will not invalidate my discovery, which has been amply
verified by other means. It may be, indeed, that my discovery is so far
ahead of present engineering—.
"

"See here!" raged Cochrane. "You can't take off with Babs on board! This
is dangerous!"

Nobody paid any attention. Jones made frantic gestures to indicate the
most delicate of adjustments. The man in the strap-chair obeyed the
instruction with an absorbed attention. Jones suddenly threw a switch.
Something lighted, somewhere. There was a momentary throbbing sound
which was not quite a sound.

"Take it away," said Jones in a flat voice.

The man in the strap-chair pressed hard on the controls. Cochrane
glanced desperately out of one of the side ports. He saw the
moonscape—the frozen lava sea with its layer of whitish-tan moondust.
He saw many moon-jeeps gathered near, as if most of the population of
Lunar City had been gathered to watch this event. He saw the
extraordinary nearness of the moon's horizon.

But it was the most momentary of glimpses. As he opened his mouth to
roar a protest, he felt the upward, curiously comforting thrust of
acceleration to one full Earth-gravity.

The moonscape was snatched away from beneath the ship. It did not
descend. The ship did not seem to rise. The moon itself diminished and
vanished like a pricked bubble. The speed of its disappearance was
not—it specifically was not—attributable to one earth-gravity of lift
applied on a one-sixth-gravity moon.

The loudspeaker hiccoughed and was silent. Cochrane uttered the roar he
had started before the added acceleration began. But it was useless. Out
the side-port, he saw the stars. They were not still and changeless and
winking, as they appeared from the moon. These stars seemed to stir
uneasily, to shift ever so slightly among themselves, like flecks of
bright color drifting on a breeze.

Jones said in an interested voice:

"Now we'll try the booster."

He threw another switch. And again there was a momentary throbbing sound
which was not quite a sound. It was actually a sensation, which one
seemed to feel all through one's body. It lasted only the fraction of a
second, but while it lasted the stars out the side-ports ceased to be
stars. They became little lines of light, all moving toward the ship's
stern but at varying rates of speed. Some of them passed beyond view.
Some of them moved only a little. But all shifted.

Then they were again tiny spots of light, of innumerable tints and
colors, of every conceivably degree of brightness, stirring and moving
ever-so-slightly with relation to each other.

"The devil!" said Cochrane, raging.

Jones turned to him. And Jones was not quite poker-faced, now. Not
quite. He looked even pleased. Then his face went back to impassiveness
again.

"It worked," he said mildly.

"I know it worked!" sputtered Cochrane. "But—where are we? How far did
we come?"

"I haven't the least idea," said Jones mildly as before. "Does it
matter?"

Cochrane glared at him. Then he realized how completely too late it was
to protest anything.

The man he had seen absorbed in the handling of controls now lifted his
hands from the board. The rockets died. There was a vast silence, and
weightlessness. Cochrane weighed nothing. This was free flight
again—like practically all of the ninety-odd hours from the space
platform to the moon. The pilot left the controls and in an accustomed
fashion soared to a port on the opposite side of the room. He gazed out,
and then behind, and said in a tone of astonished satisfaction:

"This is good!—There's the sun!"

"How far?" asked Jones.

"It's fifth magnitude," said the pilot happily. "We really did pile on
the horses!"

Jones looked momentarily pleased again. Cochrane said in a voice that
even to himself sounded outraged:

"You mean the sun's a fifth-magnitude star from here? What the devil
happened?"

"Booster," said Jones, nearly with enthusiasm. "When the field was just
a radiation speed-up, I used forty milliamperes of current to the square
centimetre of field-plate. That was the field-strength when we sent the
signal-rocket across the crater. For the distress-torpedo test, I
stepped the field-strength up. I used a tenth of an ampere per square
centimetre. I told you! And don't you remember that I wondered what
would happen if I used a capacity-storage system?"

Cochrane held fast to a hand-hold.

"The more power you put into your infernal field," he demanded, "the
more speed you get?"

Jones said contentedly:

"There's a limit. It depends on the temperature of the things in the
field. But I've fixed up the field, now, like a spot-welding outfit.
Like a strobe-light. We took off with a light field. It's on now—we
have to keep it on. But I got hold of some pretty storage condensers. I
hooked them up in parallel to get a momentary surge of high-amperage
current when I shorted them through my field-making coils. Couldn't make
it a steady current! Everything would blow! But I had a surge of
probably six amps per square centimetre for a while."

Cochrane swallowed.

"The field was sixty times as strong as the one the distress-torpedo
used? We went—we're going—sixty times as fast?"

"We had lots more speed than that!" But then Jones' enthusiasm dwindled.
"I haven't had time to check," he said unhappily. "It's one of the
things I want to get at right away. But in theory the field should
modify the effect of inertia as the fourth power of its strength. Sixty
to the fourth is—."

"How far," demanded Cochrane, "is Proxima Centaurus? That's the nearest
star to Earth. How near did we come to reaching it?"

The pilot on the other side of the control-room said with a trace less
than his former zest:

"That looks like Sirius, over there ..."

"We didn't head for Proxima Centaurus," said Jones mildly. "It's too
close! And we have to keep the field-plate back on the moon lined up
with us, more or less, so we headed out roughly along the moon's axis.
Toward where its north pole points."

"Then where are we headed? Where are we going?"

"We're not going anywhere just yet," said Jones without interest. "We
have to find out where we are, and from that—"

Cochrane ran his hand through his hair.

"Look!" he protested. "Who's running this show? You didn't tell me you
were going to take off! You didn't pick out a destination! You didn't—"

Jones said very patiently:

"We have to try out the ship. We have to find out how fast it goes with
how much field and how much rocket-thrust. We have to find out how far
we went and if it was in a straight line. We even have to find out how
to land! The ship's a new piece of apparatus. We can't do things with it
until we find out what it can do."

Cochrane stared at him. Then he swallowed.

"I see," he said. "The financial and business department of Spaceways,
Inc., has done its stuff for the time being."

Jones nodded.

"The technical staff now takes over?"

Jones nodded again.

"I still think," said Cochrane, "that we could have done with a little
interdepartmental cooperation. How long before you know what you're
about?"

Jones shook his head.

"I can't even guess. Ask Babs to come up here, will you?"

Cochrane threw up his hands. He went toward the
spiral-ladder-with-handholds that led below. He went down into the main
saloon. A tiny green light winked on and off, urgently, on the far side.
Babs was seated at a tiny board, there. As Cochrane looked, she pushed
buttons with professional skill. Bill Holden sat in a strap-chair with
his face a greenish hue.

"We took off," said Holden in a strained voice.

"We did," said Cochrane. "And the sun's a fifth magnitude star from
where we've got to—which is no place in particular. And I've just found
out that we started off at random and Jones and the pilot he picked up
are now happily about to do some pure-science research!"

Holden closed his eyes.

"When you want to cheer me up," he said feebly, "you can tell me we're
about to crash somewhere and this misery will soon be over."

Cochrane said bitterly:

"Taking off without a destination! Letting Babs come along! They don't
know how far we've come and they don't know where we're going! This is a
hell of a way to run a business!"

"Who called it a business?" asked Holden, as feebly as before. "It
started out as a psychiatric treatment!"

Babs' voice came from the side of the saloon where she sat at a
vision-tube and microphone. She was saying professionally:

"I assure you it's true. We are linked to you by the Dabney field, in
which radiation travels much faster than light. When you were a little
boy didn't you ever put a string between two tin cans, and then talk
along the string?"

Cochrane stopped beside her scowling. She looked up.

"The press association men on Luna, Mr. Cochrane. They saw us take off,
and the radar verified that we traveled some hundred of thousands of
miles, but then we simply vanished! They don't understand how they can
talk to us without even the time-lag between Earth and Lunar City. I was
explaining."

"I'll take it," said Cochrane. "Jones wants you in the control-room.
Cameras? Who was handling the cameras?"

"Mr. Bell," said Babs briskly. "It's his hobby, along with poker-playing
and children."