The Black Galaxy

CHAPTER TWO Take Off

NOW he stood beside the incomplete hulk of the Stellaris with the orders that ended his career in his hand. "It still seems to me that I did the right thing," Rod said bitterly. "I guessed it as a sort of booby-trap. It was a gadget to signal somebody, somewhere, when men climbed up to the point of achieving space-travel! And who'd want to be warned when we reached that stage? Not friends certainly! If they'd been friendly they'd have helped!"

"Of course they would!" said Kit with conviction. "I kept that signal from being sent," said Rod. "If I'd kept my mouth shut I'd have commanded the Stellaris and we'd have found another one—there's probably another on the central peak in Tycho's crater on the Moon—and I could have made the Commission see it

"But I had to tell about it, believing my word would be taken. So now somebody else will take the Stellaris out and it'll be pretty odd if the signal doesn't get sent off when he finds another pyramid. And then what'll happen? What would we do if we'd been traveling among the stars for ages and found a new, upstart race getting ready to compete with us? And a rather pugnacious race, at that? We'd smack them down and fast!"

Kit said, agreeing fully, "If we found them before they'd reached that point we'd try to make friends with them."

"Whoever built the pyramid found us," said Rod, drearily. "Maybe a few thousand years ago. Maybe at the time they knocked off the Martians. They didn't bother exterminating us then. We weren't worth the trouble, though the Martians were."

He shrugged his shoulders hopelessly. "Anyhow I've got my orders. Somebody'll come to take over from me within hours. I'm going to take a last look over the ship and then clear my desk and get ready to leave. Want to come with me?"

Wordlessly she pressed his arm. They went together to the air-lock. Rod Cantrell composed his face so that nobody could guess his inner feelings. The lock-doors opened and they entered.

Immediately there was the oddly pleasant smell of growing things which came from the air-purifying set-up. It was partly experimental still, but it demonstrably worked. The air in the ship had been kept fresh and breathable for more than six weeks, despite the men who worked inside the hull, by specially-bred plant life kept in hydroponic tanks.

There were chemical purifiers in reserve of course but normally the ship's air would be restored to normal as the air of Earth is kept sweet—by plants. There was even a section of the air-room in which food-plants were being tried out for the same purpose, turning out foodstuffs as a byproduct of the purification of the ship's atmosphere.

In hydroponic tanks, vegetables grew with amazing luxuriance. The Stellaris would not be quite self-sustaining but there should be at least occasional meals of dewy-fresh vegetables even when the ship was on the far side of Orion.

Rod Cantrell and Kit stepped into the unfinished interior of the ship. The smells of work were noticeable, though work had stopped for the lunch-hour. Rod looked lonesomely about. In all probability, he would never set foot in the Stellaris again.

The smell of vegetation was strong and pleasant, but there was the smell of paint too and the curious odor of heated metal cooling off—all the aromas of uncompleted construction. In a room designed for storage four painters ate their lunch companionably from lunch-boxes, rather than bother to leave the ship. An electrician smoked restfully beside his tools.

They went into the engine-room, in which there would be no single massively-moving part. A tiny isotopic generator made its humming noise. It was built around a block of artificially radioactive material which gave off electrons alone, with no neutrons or mesons or gamma rays. It yielded utterly safe power and when its total output was not needed for the ship's purposes, the excess free electrons were absorbed in another artificial isotope, which, in absorbing them, become converted into the parent substance.

A fuel-supply for years of operation thus had necessarily been built into the ship when it was made.

The field-generators, too, were all complete. They had been tested with the Stellaris safely anchored at bow and stern with tractor-beams. Rod regarded the generators hungrily. He'd designed them and they had features of which he was very proud. But now he'd never be able to see for himself how his designs stood up under service conditions.

"You know how the force-fields work," he said almost wistfully to Kit "In theory there are an indefinite number of dimensions, therefore an indefinite number of—I suppose you'd call them universes—in parallel. Our universe hangs together because all its parts attract each other magnetically and there are gravitational linkages all through space.

"There's an incredibly complex network of electrostatic stresses by which even island universes attract each other. So our universe is stable. But if all the forces that link an object to our cosmos—the things that tie it in—are cut it falls out of the universe we know.

"It goes apparently into a dark universe, where there seem to be no stars. Maybe it's a dead universe where the process of entropy is complete, where all the energy of the system has run down. But we don't know yet"

Kit nodded wisely. In the late rebellion of the Total State the city of Pittsburgh had vanished between two heart-beats with some millions of human beings. Washington had been slated to go next and Rod Cantrell had been duped—or so it was thought by the war lords of the Total State—into operating the weapon which would destroy it.

But he'd understood their weapon a little too well and it had been turned terribly against them by his understanding. Now the Earth Government ruled undisputed again—and the Earth Government had taken from Rod his chance to go with the Stellaris to the void between the stars. Because he'd made a report that nobody wanted to believe

"These generators," said Rod wistfully, "make a field close about the Stellaris which cuts every natural link between the ship and the million-billion suns of our universe. Electrostatic stresses can't go through that field. Gravitation doesn't penetrate. Magnetic lines of force are stopped. So the ship leaves our universe. As Pittsburgh did. Only—we leave one link of our own making.

"We leave a tractor-beam in existence pulling the ship toward one spot. A tractor-beam can penetrate the field that cuts off everything else. And the ship is drawn to the one spot the tractor-beam is focused on, although it moves in a parallel universe and isn't in our cosmos at all. When it stops at the object the beam is pulling we cut off the force-fields and apparently all back into our own space. But we've traveled!"

Kit nodded again. She knew all this of course but Rod was heartbroken and it helped him to talk.

"And," he said wistfully as he led the way out of the engine-room, "a pressor-beam works the same way. We can push away from a place we want to start from, instead of waiting for a tractor to reach out a few light-years to our destination."

He sounded almost enthusiastic as he went along the straight-line corridor between the engine-room and the control-cabin—as yet practically empty of controls.

"My trip to Calypso proved," he added, "the mass-inertia ratio in the dark universe I actually traveled in, isn't the same as in our universe. The speed of light is higher—much higher. The time I took to get to Mars suggested it and the trip to Calypso proved that the constants of the two spaces are different. I reached Calypso through the dark universe faster than light could make the trip through ours!"

Then he stopped. He'd reached the control-room from which he'd expected to direct the Stellaris. There was the big instrument-board with practically none of the intended instruments set into place. The switches that had been installed were taped to the "off position, to avoid accident. They'd been used just once, when the force-field generators were tried out and the ship—kept from traveling by anchoring tractor-beams holding her fast—had gone into the dark universe for minutes.

"But," said Rod, after an instant, "that's that"

He stood grimly in the ship he was now forbidden to command.

Then, just as he turned to lead Kit outside again, there came a sudden sharp crackling sound from somewhere in the ship. It had the violent harsh timbre of an electric arc. Somebody shouted frantically. By sheer instinct Rod Cantrell plunged toward the scene of emergency.

But he didn't get there. Suddenly he seemed to be falling endlessly, horribly, nightmarishly, with no weight and no grip on anything. There were vision-ports in the control-room, intended to permit a view of a landscape or of the stars. As the crackling roar grew thunderous those vision-ports turned red, then orange, then flashed through the spectrum to violet and beyond.

The vision-ports became filled with utter blackness and on the instant the control-room was as dark as any cave on Earth and Rod and Kit seemed to be hurtling blindly through sheer opacity. Kit uttered a strangled cry. She had left the floor when weight vanished. She had the hysterical sensation of an increasing, breathtaking dive.

There were screamings somewhere. There was a strange metallic smell of vaporized cable. There was a pungent reek of ozone. The roaring seemed to grow yet louder and the panic-stricken cries grew with it There came the stench of burned insulation and then of sooty smoke.

Kit cried out again, "Rod!"

He said in a coldly savage voice. "Steady! You're not falling. The fields went on from a short-circuit somewhere in the ship. Now the ship's on fire and we're in the dark universe—traveling. Steady!"

A little flicker of light—flame—appeared in the corridor leading to the engine-room. There was enough light to show Rod, floating helplessly in the air, inches only from a featureless metal wall. Kit drifted yards from any solidity, her eyes wide and filled with fear.

But the light helped. Rod twisted himself and kicked. He went tumbling—head-over-heels away from the wall—to the floor, where he grasped the edge of the incomplete control-panel. He swung himself about. The light flickered again, and he leaped, diving through weightlessness for the corridor.

He went soaring into it and a mushrooming mass of yellow incandescence licked out of it Kit screamed. But the flame died away a little as he plunged into it flared out again only when he was almost through, so that it barely singed him. He went plunging on into the engine-room.

Unable to stop, he floated until his out-stretched arms cushioned his impact against the far wall. He swung about again and soared a second time—this time for the humming small isotopic generator which supplied the electric current for all the ship.

He reached it. He held fast—it was extraordinary hard to hold fast with no weight to help—and savagely cranked off the manual switch which had kept the unit inert during shipment. The roaring of the arc died instantly. There was only an ominous booming noise as paint and insulation and construction-stores heated by the arc continued to burn. But even that tended to die down without the arc to keep the flame supplied with vaporized fuel.

Then Rod looked at the ports in the wall of the engine-room, and cold sweat came out all over him. The ship was incomplete. It was unequipped. It had no stores at all. But it had taken off from earth. There were stars in view out the vision-ports, now that the force-field had cut off and the ship was back in normal space. But it wasn't on Earth. It wasn't on any planet.

And there wasn't any sunlight shining in any of the ports. There weren't—this made Rod's throat go dry when he threw himself across the dark vacancy of the engine-room to one port after another and stared out—there weren't even any familiar constellations. The Stellaris had had a speed and kinetic energy of its own by virtue of the shared motion of the Earth on its axis and around the sun, and the other motion of the solar system as a whole.

It had gone into the dark universe where the constants of mass and inertia were strange and still unexplored. There was not even a bright yellow star anywhere in the heavens which might be Earth's sun at a greater distance than usual. The Stellaris was somewhere among the stars. Earth and its sun could be anywhere, in any direction, at almost any distance up to light-millennia away. There was no possible way to tell. Even worse—

The ship, in fact, was a derelict. It had been designed to be driven by the reaction of its tractor and pressor-beams upon solid bodies outside of itself. Now, apparently, the nearest solid objects were the stars. It would take years for the beams to reach the nearest and there was no instrument on board by which the nearest might even be chosen. There were no stores of food, no star-maps, no trained crew—there was no faintest reasonable ground for hope nor reason for any effort.

But Kit was on board. So when the flames died down and only a penetrating, noisesome reek of burned paint filled the air, Rod Cantrell turned on the isotopic dynamo once more and switched on lights throughout the ship.

Painfully he began the process of searching the unfinished hulk for unwilling members of its company, to calm them and sooth them and threaten them in preparation for labors he had yet to imagine, for purposes he had yet to devise, toward ends he could not even conceive of. Oddly enough, he did not even think of the alien race that had been the cause of his uneasiness back on Earth. But here among the stars was where the greatest danger lay.