Table of Contents

As Earth's faster-than-light spaceship hung in the
void between galaxies, Arcot, Wade, Morey and
Fuller could see below them, like a vast shining horizon,
the mass of stars that formed their own island
universe. Morey worked a moment with his slide rule,
then said, "We made good time! Twenty-nine light
years in ten seconds! Yet you had it on at only half
power...."

Arcot pushed the control lever all the way to full
power. The ship filled with the strain of flowing
energy, and sparks snapped in the air of the control
room as they raced at an inconceivable speed
through the darkness of intergalactic space.

But suddenly, far off to their left and far to their
right, they saw two shining ships paralleling their
course! They held grimly to the course of the Earth
ship, bracketing it like an official guard.

The Earth scientists stared at them in wonder.
"Lord," muttered Morey, "where can they have come
from?"

John W. Campbell first started writing in 1930 when
his first short story, When the Atoms Failed, was accepted
by a science-fiction magazine. At that time he
was twenty years old and still a student at college. As the
title of the story indicates, he was even at that time
occupied with the significance of atomic energy and
nuclear physics.

For the next seven years, Campbell, bolstered by a
scientific background that ran from childhood experiments,
to study at Duke University and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, wrote and sold science-fiction,
achieving for himself an enviable reputation in the field.

In 1937 he became the editor of Astounding Stories
magazine and applied himself at once to the task of
bettering the magazine and the field of s-f writing
in general. His influence on science-fiction since then
has been great. Today he still remains as the editor of
that magazine's evolved and redesigned successor,
Analog.

ISLANDS

OF

SPACE

by

JOHN W. CAMPBELL

ACE BOOKS, INC.

1120 Avenue of the Americas

New York, N.Y. 10036


ISLANDS OF SPACE







Copyright, 1956, by John W. Campbell, Jr.

Copyright, 1930, by Experimenter Publications, Inc.



An Ace Book, by arrangement with the author.



All Rights Reserved





Cover by McKeon





Also by John W. Campbell In Ace editions:



THE BLACK STAR PASSES (F-346)

THE MIGHTIEST MACHINE (F-364)









Printed in U.S.A.

PROLOGUE

In the early part of the Twenty Second Century, Dr.
Richard Arcot, hailed as "the greatest living physicist", and
Robert Morey, his brilliant mathematical assistant, discovered
the so-called "molecular motion drive", which utilized the
random energy of heat to produce useful motion.

John Fuller, designing engineer, helped the two men to
build a ship which used the drive in order to have a weapon
to seek out and capture the mysterious Air Pirate whose
robberies were ruining Transcontinental Airways.

The Pirate, Wade, was a brilliant but neurotic chemist
who had discovered, among other things, the secret of invisibility.
Cured of his instability by modern psychomedical
techniques, he was hired by Arcot to help build an interplanetary
vessel to go to Venus.

The Venusians proved to be a humanoid race of people
who used telepathy for communication. Although they were
similar to Earthmen, their blue blood and double thumbs
made them enough different to have caused distrust and
racial friction, had not both planets been drawn together in
a common bond of defense by the passing of the Black Star.

The Black Star, Nigra, was a dead, burned-out sun surrounded
by a planetary system very much like our own. But
these people had been forced to use their science to produce
enough heat and light to stay alive in the cold, black depths
of interstellar space. There was nothing evil or menacing in
their attack on the Solar System; they simply wanted a star
that gave off light and heat. So they attacked, not realizing
that they were attacking beings equal in intelligence to
themselves.

They were at another disadvantage, too. The Nigrans had
spent long millennia fighting their environment and had had
no time to fight among themselves, so they knew nothing of
how to wage a war. The Earthmen and Venusians knew
only too well, since they had a long history of war on each
planet.

Inevitably, the Nigrans were driven back to the Black
Star.[A]

The war was over. And things became dull. And the taste
of adventure still remained on the tongues of Arcot, Wade,
and Morey.

I

Three men sat around a table which was
littered with graphs, sketches of mathematical functions, and
books of tensor formulae. Beside the table stood a Munson-Bradley
integraph calculator which one of the men was
using to check some of the equations he had already derived.
The results they were getting seemed to indicate something
well above and beyond what they had expected.

And anything that surprised the team of Arcot, Wade,
and Morey was surprising indeed.

The intercom buzzed, interrupting their work.

Dr. Richard Arcot reached over and lifted the switch.
"Arcot speaking."

The face that flashed on the screen was businesslike and
determined. "Dr. Arcot, Mr. Fuller is here. My orders are
to check with you on all visitors."

Arcot nodded. "Send him up. But from now on, I'm not
in to anyone but my father or the Interplanetary Chairman
or the elder Mr. Morey. If they come, don't bother to call,
just send 'em up. I will not receive calls for the next ten
hours. Got it?"

"You won't be bothered, Dr. Arcot."

Arcot cut the circuit and the image collapsed.

Less than two minutes later, a light flashed above the
door. Arcot touched the release, and the door slid aside.
He looked at the man entering and said, with mock coldness:

"If it isn't the late John Fuller. What did you do—take
a plane? It took you an hour to get here from Chicago."

Fuller shook his head sadly. "Most of the time was spent
in getting past your guards. Getting to the seventy-fourth
floor of the Transcontinental Airways Building is harder
than stealing the Taj Mahal." Trying to suppress a grin,
Fuller bowed low. "Besides, I think it would do your royal
highness good to be kept waiting for a while. You're paid
a couple of million a year to putter around in a lab while
honest people work for a living. Then, if you happen to
stub your toe over some useful gadget, they increase your
pay. They call you scientists and spend the resources of two
worlds to get you anything you want—and apologize if they
don't get it within twenty-four hours.

"No doubt about it; it will do your majesties good to
wait."

With a superior smile, he seated himself at the table and
shuffled calmly through the sheets of equations before him.

Arcot and Wade were laughing, but not Robert Morey.
With a sorrowful expression, he walked to the window and
looked out at the hundreds of slim, graceful aircars that
floated above the city.

"My friends," said Morey, almost tearfully, "I give you
the great Dr. Arcot. These countless machines we see have
come from one idea of his. Just an idea, mind you! And
who worked it into mathematical form and made it calculable,
and therefore useful? I did!

"And who worked out the math for the interplanetary
ships? I did! Without me they would never have been built!"
He turned dramatically, as though he were playing King
Lear. "And what do I get for it?" He pointed an accusing
finger at Arcot. "What do I get? He is called 'Earth's most
brilliant physicist', and I, who did all the hard work, am
referred to as 'his mathematical assistant'." He shook his head
solemnly. "It's a hard world."

At the table, Wade frowned, then looked at the ceiling.
"If you'd make your quotations more accurate, they'd be
more trustworthy. The news said that Arcot was the 'System's
most brilliant physicist', and that you were the 'brilliant
mathematical assistant who showed great genius in developing
the mathematics of Dr. Arcot's new theory'." Having delivered
his speech, Wade began stoking his pipe.

Fuller tapped his fingers on the table. "Come on, you
clowns, knock it off and tell me why you called a hard-working
man away from his drafting table to come up to this
play room of yours. What have you got up your sleeve this
time?"

"Oh, that's too bad," said Arcot, leaning back comfortably
in his chair. "We're sorry you're so busy. We were
thinking of going out to see what Antares, Betelguese, or
Polaris looked like at close range. And, if we don't get too
bored, we might run over to the giant model nebula in
Andromeda, or one of the others. Tough about your being
busy; you might have helped us by designing the ship and
earned your board and passage. Tough." Arcot looked at
Fuller sadly.

Fuller's eyes narrowed. He knew Arcot was kidding, but
he also knew how far Arcot would go when he was kidding—and
this sounded like he meant it. Fuller said: "Look,
teacher, a man named Einstein said that the velocity of
light was tops over two hundred years ago, and nobody's
come up with any counter evidence yet. Has the Lord instituted
a new speed law?"

"Oh, no," said Wade, waving his pipe in a grand gesture
of importance. "Arcot just decided he didn't like that law
and made a new one himself."

"Now wait a minute!" said Fuller. "The velocity of light
is a property of space!"

Arcot's bantering smile was gone. "Now you've got it,
Fuller. The velocity of light, just as Einstein said, is a property
of space. What happens if we change space?"

Fuller blinked. "Change space? How?"

Arcot pointed toward a glass of water sitting nearby.
"Why do things look distorted through the water? Because
the light rays are bent. Why are they bent? Because as
each wave front moves from air to water, it slows down.
The electromagnetic and gravitational fields between those
atoms are strong enough to increase the curvature of the
space between them. Now, what happens if we reverse that
effect?"

"Oh," said Fuller softly. "I get it. By changing the curvature
of the space surrounding you, you could get any
velocity you wanted. But what about acceleration? It would
take years to reach those velocities at any acceleration a
man could stand."

Arcot shook his head. "Take a look at the glass of water
again. What happens when the light comes out of the water?
It speeds up again instantaneously. By changing the space
around a spaceship, you instantaneously change the velocity
of the ship to a comparable velocity in that space. And
since every particle is accelerated at the same rate, you
wouldn't feel it, any more than you'd feel the acceleration
due to gravity in free fall."

Fuller nodded slowly. Then, suddenly, a light gleamed in
his eyes. "I suppose you've figured out where you're going
to get the energy to power a ship like that?"

"He has," said Morey. "Uncle Arcot isn't the type to forget
a little detail like that."

"Okay, give," said Fuller.

Arcot grinned and lit up his own pipe, joining Wade in
an attempt to fill the room with impenetrable fog.

"All right," Arcot began, "we needed two things: a
tremendous source of power and a way to store it.

"For the first, ordinary atomic energy wouldn't do. It's
not controllable enough and uranium isn't something we could
carry by the ton. So I began working with high-density currents.

"At the temperature of liquid helium, near absolute zero,
lead becomes a nearly perfect conductor. Back in nineteen
twenty, physicists had succeeded in making a current flow
for four hours in a closed circuit. It was just a ring of lead,
but the resistance was so low that the current kept on flowing.
They even managed to get six hundred amperes through
a piece of lead wire no bigger than a pencil lead.

"I don't know why they didn't go on from there, but
they didn't. Possibly it was because they didn't have the
insulation necessary to keep down the corona effect; in a
high-density current, the electrons tend to push each other
sideways out of the wire.

"At any rate, I tried it, using lux metal as an insulator
around the wire."

"Hold it!" Fuller interrupted. "What, may I ask, is lux
metal?"

"That was Wade's idea," Arcot grinned. "You remember
those two substances we found in the Nigran ships during
the war?"

"Sure," said Fuller. "One was transparent and the other
was a perfect reflector. You said they were made of light—photons
so greatly condensed that they were held together
by their gravitational fields."

"Right. We called them light-metal. But Wade said that
was too confusing. With a specific gravity of 103.5, light-metal
was certainly not a light metal! So Wade coined a
couple of words. Lux is the Latin for light, so he named
the transparent one lux and the reflecting one relux."

"It sounds peculiar," Fuller observed, "but so does every
coined word when you first hear it. Go on with your story."

Arcot relit his pipe and went on. "I put a current of ten
thousand amps through a little piece of lead wire, and
that gave me a current density of 10¹⁰ amps per square inch.

"Then I started jacking up the voltage, and modified
the thing with a double-polarity field somewhat similar to
the molecular motion field except that it works on a sub-nucleonic
level. As a result, about half of the lead fed into
the chamber became contraterrene lead! The atoms just
turned themselves inside out, so to speak, giving us an atom
with positrons circling a negatively charged nucleus. It even
gave the neutrons a reverse spin, converting them into anti-neutrons.

"Result: total annihilation of matter! When the contraterrene
lead atoms met the terrene lead atoms, mutual annihilation
resulted, giving us pure energy.

"Some of this power can be bled off to power the mechanism
itself; the rest is useful energy. We've got all the
power we need—power, literally by the ton."

Fuller said nothing; he just looked dazed. He was well
beginning to believe that these three men could do the impossible
and do it to order.

"The second thing," Arcot continued, "was, as I said, a
way to store the energy so that it could be released as rapidly
or as slowly as we needed it.

"That was Morey's baby. He figured it would be possible
to use the space-strain apparatus to store energy. It's
an old method; induction coils, condensers, and even gravity
itself are storing energy by straining space. But with Morey's
apparatus we could store a lot more.

"A torus-shaped induction coil encloses all its magnetic
field within it; the torus, or 'doughnut' coil, has a perfectly
enclosed magnetic field. We built an enclosed coil,
using Morey's principle, and expected to store a few watts
of power in it to see how long we could hold it.

"Unfortunately, we made the mistake of connecting it to
the city power lines, and it cost us a hundred and fifty
dollars at a quarter of a cent per kilowatt hour. We blew
fuses all over the place. After that, we used the relux plate
generator.

"At any rate, the gadget can store power and plenty of
it, and it can put it out the same way."

Arcot knocked the ashes out of his pipe and smiled at
Fuller. "Those are the essentials of what we have to offer.
We give you the job of figuring out the stresses and strains
involved. We want a ship with a cruising radius of a thousand
million light years."

"Yes, sir! Right away, sir! Do you want a gross or only
a dozen?" Fuller asked sarcastically. "You sure believe in big
orders! And whence cometh the cold cash for this lovely
dream of yours?"

"That," said Morey darkly, "is where the trouble comes
in. We have to convince Dad. As President of Transcontinental
Airways, he's my boss, but the trouble is, he's also
my father. When he hears that I want to go gallivanting
off all over the Universe with you guys, he is very likely to
turn thumbs down on the whole deal. Besides, Arcot's dad
has a lot of influence around here, too, and I have a
healthy hunch he won't like the idea, either."

"I rather fear he won't," agreed Arcot gloomily.

A silence hung over the room that felt almost as heavy
as the pall of pipe smoke the air conditioners were trying
frantically to disperse.

The elder Mr. Morey had full control of their finances.
A ship that would cost easily hundreds of millions of dollars
was well beyond anything the four men could get by themselves.
Their inventions were the property of Transcontinental,
but even if they had not been, not one of the four men
would think of selling them to another company.

Finally, Wade said: "I think we'll stand a much better
chance if we show them a big, spectacular exhibition; something
really impressive. We'll point out all the advantages
and uses of the apparatus. Then we'll show them complete
plans for the ship. They might consent."

"They might," replied Morey smiling. "It's worth a try,
anyway. And let's get out of the city to do it. We can go
up to my place in Vermont. We can use the lab up there
for all we need. We've got everything worked out, so
there's no need to stay here.

"Besides, I've got a lake up there in which we can indulge
in a little atavism to the fish stage of evolution."

"Good enough," Arcot agreed, grinning broadly. "And
we'll need that lake, too. Here in the city it's only eighty-five
because the aircars are soaking up heat for their molecular
drive, but out in the country it'll be in the nineties."

"To the mountains, then! Let's pack up!"

II

The many books and papers they had collected were hastily
put into the briefcases, and the four men took the
elevator to the landing area on the roof.

"We'll take my car," Morey said. "The rest of you can
just leave yours here. They'll be safe for a few days."

They all piled in as Morey slid into the driver's seat and
turned on the power.

They rose slowly, looking below them at the traffic of
the great city. New York had long since abandoned her
rivers as trade routes; they had been covered solidly by
steel decks which were used as public landing fields and
ground car routes. Around them loomed titanic structures of
glistening colored tile. The sunlight reflected brilliantly from
them, and the contrasting colors of the buildings seemed
to blend together into a great, multicolored painting.

The darting planes, the traffic of commerce down between
the great buildings, and the pleasure cars above, combined
to give a series of changing, darting shadows that wove
a flickering pattern over the city. The long lines of ships
coming in from Chicago, London, Buenos Aires and San
Francisco, and the constant flow from across the Pole—from
Russia, India, and China, were like mighty black serpents
that wound their way into the city.

Morey cut into a Northbound traffic level, moved into
the high-speed lane, and eased in on the accelerator. He
held to the traffic pattern for two hundred and fifty miles,
until he was well past Boston, then he turned at the first
break and fired the ship toward their goal in Vermont.

Less than forty-five minutes since they had left New
York, Morey was dropping the car toward the little mountain
lake that offered them a place for seclusion. Gently, he
let the ship glide smoothly into the shed where the first
molecular motion ship had been built. Arcot jumped out,
saying:

"We're here—unload and get going. I think a swim and
some sleep is in order before we start work on this ship.
We can begin tomorrow." He looked approvingly at the
clear blue water of the little lake.

Wade climbed out and pushed Arcot to one side. "All
right, out of the way, then, little one, and let a man get
going." He headed for the house with the briefcases.

Arcot was six feet two and weighed close to two hundred,
but Wade was another two inches taller and weighed
a good fifty pounds more. His arms and chest were built
on the same general plan as those of a gorilla. He had good
reason to call Arcot little.

Morey, though still taller, was not as heavily formed,
and weighed only a few pounds more than Arcot, while Fuller
was a bit smaller than Arcot.

Due to several factors, the size of the average human
being had been steadily increasing for several centuries.
Only Wade would have been considered a "big" man by
the average person, for the average man was over six feet
tall.

They relaxed most of the afternoon, swimming and indulging
in a few wrestling matches. At wrestling, Wade consistently
proved himself not only built like a gorilla but
muscled like one; but Arcot proved that skill was not without
merit several times, for he had found that if he could
make the match last more than two minutes, Wade's huge
muscles would find an insufficient oxygen supply and tire
quickly.

That evening, after dinner, Morey engaged Wade in a
fierce battle of chess, with Fuller as an interested spectator.
Arcot, too, was watching, but he was saying nothing.

After several minutes of uneventful play, Morey stopped
suddenly and glared at the board. "Now why'd I make that
move? I intended to move my queen over there to check
your king on the red diagonal."

"Yeah," replied Wade gloomily, "that's what I wanted
you to do. I had a sure checkmate in three moves."

Arcot smiled quietly.

They continued play for several moves, then it was Wade
who remarked that something seemed to be influencing his
play.

"I had intended to trade queens. I'm glad I didn't, though;
I think this leaves me in a better position."

"It sure does," agreed Morey. "I was due to clean up
on the queen trade. You surprised me, too; you usually go
in for trades. I'm afraid my position is hopeless now."

It was. In the next ten moves, Wade spotted the weak
points in every attack Morey made; the attack crumbled
disastrously and white was forced to resign, his king in a
hopeless position.

Wade rubbed his chin. "You know, Morey, I seemed to
know exactly why you made every move, and I saw every
possibility involved."

"Yeah—so I noticed," said Morey with a grin.

"Come on, Morey, let's try a game," said Fuller, sliding
into the chair Wade had vacated.

Although ordinarily equally matched with Fuller, Morey
again went down to disastrous defeat in an amazingly short
time. It almost seemed as if Fuller could anticipate every
move.

"Brother, am I off form today," he said, rising from the
table. "Come on, Arcot—let's see you try Wade."

Arcot sat down, and although he had never played chess
as extensively as the others, he proceeded to clean Wade out
lock, stock, and barrel.

"Now what's come over you?" asked Morey in astonishment
as he saw a very complicated formation working out, a
formation he knew was far better than Arcot's usual game.
He had just worked it out and felt very proud of it.

Arcot looked at him and smiled. "That's the answer,
Morey!"

Morey blinked. "What—what's the answer to what?"

"Yes—I meant it—don't be so surprised—you've seen it
done before. I have—no, not under him, but a more experienced
teacher. I figured it would come in handy in our
explorations."

Morey's face grew more and more astonished as Arcot's
strange monologue continued.

Finally, Arcot turned to Wade, who was looking at him
and Morey in wide-eyed wonder. And this time, it was
Wade who began talking in a monologue.

"You did?" he said in a surprised voice. "When?" There
was a long pause, during which Arcot stared at Wade with
such intensity that Fuller began to understand what was
happening.

"Well," said Wade, "if you've learned the trick so thoroughly,
try it out. Let's see you project your thoughts! Go
ahead!"

Fuller, now understanding fully what was going on, burst
out laughing. "He has been projecting his thoughts! He
hasn't said a word to you!" Then he looked at Arcot. "As
a matter of fact, you've said so little that I don't know how
you pulled this telepathic stunt—though I'm quite convinced
that you did."

"I spent three months on Venus a while back," said Arcot,
"studying with one of their foremost telepathists. Actually,
most of that time was spent on theory; learning how to do it
isn't a difficult proposition. It just takes practice.

"The whole secret is that everyone has the power; it's
a very ancient power in the human brain, and most of the
lower animals possess it to a greater degree than do humans.
When Man developed language, it gave his thoughts more
concreteness and permitted a freer and more clearly conceived
type of thinking. The result was that telepathy fell
into disuse.

"I'm going to show you how to do it because it will be
invaluable if we meet a strange race. By projecting pictures
and concepts, you can dispense with going to the trouble of
learning the language.

"After you learn the basics, all you'll need is practice,
but watch yourself! Too much practice can give you the
great-granddaddy of all headaches! Okay, now to begin
with ..."

Arcot spent the rest of the evening teaching them the
Venerian system of telepathy.

They all rose at nine. Arcot got up first, and the others
found it expedient to follow his example shortly thereafter.
He had brought a large Tesla coil into the bedroom from
the lab and succeeded in inducing sufficient voltage in the
bedsprings to make very effective, though harmless, sparks.

"Come on, boys, hit the deck! Wade, as chief chemist,
you are to synthesize a little coffee and heat-treat a few
eggs for us. We have work ahead today! Rise and shine!"
He didn't shut off the coil until he was assured that each
of them had gotten a considerable distance from his bed.

"Ouch!" yelled Morey. "Okay! Shut it off! I want to get
my pants! We're all up! You win!"

After breakfast, they all went into the room they used as
a calculating room. Here they had two different types of
integraph calculators and plenty of paper and equipment
to do their own calculations and draw graphs.

"To begin with," said Fuller, "let's decide what shape we
want to use. As designer, I'd like to point out that a sphere
is the strongest, a cube easiest to build, and a torpedo shape
the most efficient aerodynamically. However, we intend to use
it in space, not air.

"And remember, we'll need it more as a home than as a
ship during the greater part of the trip."

"We might need an aerodynamically stable hull," Wade interjected.
"It came in mighty handy on Venus. They're
darned useful in emergencies. What do you think, Arcot?"

"I favor the torpedo shape. Okay, now we've got a hull.
How about some engines to run it? Let's get those, too. I'll
name the general things first; facts and figures can come
later.

"First: We must have a powerful mass-energy converter.
We could use the cavity radiator and use cosmic rays to
warm it, and drive the individual power units that way, or
we can have a main electrical power unit and warm them
all electrically. Now, which one would be the better?"

Morey frowned. "I think we'd be safer if we didn't depend
on any one plant, but had each as separate as possible.
I'm for the individual cavity radiators."

"Question," interjected Fuller. "How do these cavity radiators
work?"

"They're built like a thermos bottle," Arcot explained.
"The inner shell will be of rough relux, which will absorb
the heat efficiently, while the outer one will be of polished
relux to keep the radiation inside. Between the two we'll run
a flow of helium at two tons per square inch pressure to
carry the heat to the molecular motion apparatus. The neck
of the bottle will contain the atomic generator."

Fuller still looked puzzled. "See here; with this new space
strain drive, why do we have to have the molecular drive
at all?"

"To move around near a heavy mass—in the presence
of a strong gravitational field," Arcot said. "A gravitational
field tends to warp space in such a way that the velocity of
light is lower in its presence. Our drive tries to warp or
strain space in the opposite manner. The two would simply
cancel each other out and we'd waste a lot of power going
nowhere. As a matter of fact, the gravitational field of the
sun is so intense that we'll have to go out beyond the
orbit of Pluto before we can use the space strain drive
effectively."

"I catch," said Fuller. "Now to get back to the generators.
I think the power units would be simpler if they were
controlled from one electrical power source, and just as
reliable. Anyway, the molecular motion power is controlled,
of necessity, from a single generator, so if one is apt to go
bad, the other is, too."

"Very good reasoning," smiled Morey, "but I'm still strong
for decentralization. I suggest a compromise. We can have
the main power unit and the main verticals, which will be
the largest, controlled by individual cosmic ray heaters,
and the rest run by electric power units. They'd be just
heating coils surrounded by the field."

"A good idea," said Arcot. "I'm in favor of the compromise.
Okay, Fuller? Okay. Now the next problem is weapons. I
suggest we use a separate control panel and a separate
generating panel for the power tubes we'll want in the
molecular beam projectors."

The molecular beam projector simply projected the field
that caused molecular motion to take place as wanted. As
weapons, they were terrifically deadly. If half a mountain
is suddenly thrown into the air because all the random
motion of its molecules becomes concentrated in one direction,
it becomes a difficult projectile to fight. Or touch the
bow of a ship with the beam; the bow drops to absolute
zero and is driven back on the stern, with all the speed of
its billions of molecules. The general effect is similar to that
produced by two ships having a head-on collision at ten
miles per second.

Anything touched by the beam is broken by its own
molecules, twisted by its own strength, and crushed by its
own toughness. Nothing can resist it.

"My idea," Arcot went on, "was that since the same power
is used for both the beams and the drive, we'll have two
separate power-tube banks to generate it. That way, if one
breaks down, we can switch to the other. We can even use
both at once on the drive, if necessary; the molecular motion
machines will stand it if we make them of relux and anchor
them with lux metal beams. The projectors would be able
to handle the power, too, using Dad's new system.

"That will give us more protection, and, at the same
time, full power. Since we'll have several projectors, the
power needed to operate the ship will be about equal to the
power required to operate the projectors.

"And I also suggest we mount some heat beam projectors."

"Why?" objected Wade. "They're less effective than the
molecular rays. The molecular beams are instantly irresistible,
while the heat beams take time to heat up the target.
Sure, they're unhealthy to deal with, but no more so than
the molecular beam."

"True enough," Arcot agreed, "but the heat beam is more
spectacular, and we may find that a mere spectacular display
will accomplish as much as actual destruction. Besides,
the heat beams are more local in effect. If we want to kill
an enemy and spare his captive, we want a beam that
will be deadly where it hits, not for fifty yards around."

"Hold it a second," said Fuller wearily. "Now it's heat
beams. Don't you guys think you ought to explain a little
bit to the poor goon who's designing this flying battlewagon?
How did you get a heat beam?"

Arcot grinned. "Simple. We use a small atomic cavity
radiator at one end of which is a rough relux parabolic filter.
Beyond that is a lux metal lens. The relux heats up
tremendously, and since there is no polished relux to reflect
it back, the heat is radiated out through the lux metal lens
as a powerful heat beam."

"Okay, fine," said Fuller. "But stop springing new gadgets
on me, will you?"

"I'll try not to," Arcot laughed. "Anyway, let's get on to
the main power plant. Remember that our condenser coil is
a gadget for storing energy in space; we are therefore
obliged to supply it with energy to store. Just forming the
drive field alone will require two times ten to the twenty-seventh
ergs, or the energy of about two and a half tons of
matter. That means a whale of a lot of lead wire will have
to be fed into our conversion generators; it would take several
hours to charge the coils. We'd better have two big
chargers to do the job.

"The controls we can figure out later. How about it?
Any suggestions?"

"Sounds okay to me," said Morey, and the others agreed.

"Good enough. Now, as far as air and water go, we can
use the standard spacecraft apparatus, Fuller, so you can
figure that in any way you want to."

"We'll need a lab, too," Wade put in. "And a machine
shop with plenty of spare parts—everything we can possibly
think of. Remember, we may want to build some things out
in space."

"Right. And I wonder—" Arcot looked thoughtful. "How
about the invisibility apparatus? It may prove useful, and it
won't cost much. Let's put that in, too."

The apparatus he mentioned was simply a high-frequency
oscillator tube of extreme power which caused vibrations
approaching light frequency to be set up in the molecules
of the ship. As a result, the ship became transparent, since
light could easily pass through the vibrating molecules.

There was only one difficulty; the ship was invisible,
all right, but it became a radio sender and could easily be
detected by a directional radio. However, if the secret were
unknown, it was a very effective method of disappearing.
And, since the frequency was so high, a special detector
was required to pick it up.

"Is that all you need?" asked Fuller.

"Nope," said Arcot, leaning back in his chair. "Now
comes the kicker. I suggest that we make the hull of foot-thick
lux metal and line it on the inside with relux wherever
we want it to be opaque. And we want relux shutters on the
windows. Lux is too doggone transparent; if we came too
close to a hot star, we'd be badly burned."

Fuller looked almost goggle-eyed. "A—foot—of—lux! Good
Lord, Arcot! This ship would weigh a quarter of a million
tons! That stuff is dense!"

"Sure," agreed Arcot, "but we'll need the protection.
With a ship like that, you could run through a planetoid
without hurting the hull. We'll make the relux inner wall
about an inch thick, with a vacuum between them for protection
in a warm atmosphere. And if some tremendous
force did manage to crack the outer wall, we wouldn't be
left without protection."

"Okay, you're the boss," Fuller said resignedly. "It's going
to have to be a big ship, though. I figure a length of about
two hundred feet and a diameter of around thirty feet. The
interior I'll furnish with aluminum; it'll be cheaper and
lighter. How about an observatory?"

"Put it in the rear of the ship," Wade suggested. "We'll
mount one of the Nigran telectroscopes."

"Control room in the bow, of course," Morey chipped in.

"I've got you," Fuller said. "I'll work the thing out and
give you a cost estimate and drawings."

"Fine," said Arcot, standing up. "Meanwhile, the rest of
us will work out our little exhibition to impress Mr. Morey
and Dad. Come on, lads, let's get back to the lab."

III

It was two weeks before Dr. Robert Arcot and his old
friend Arthur Morey, president of Transcontinental Airways,
were invited to see what their sons had been working on.

The demonstration was to take place in the radiation labs
in the basements of the Transcontinental building. Arcot,
Wade, Morey, and Fuller had brought the equipment in
from the country place in Vermont and set it up in one of
the heavily-lined, vault-like chambers that were used for
radiation experiments.

The two older men were seated before a huge eighty-inch
three-dimensional television screen several floors above
the level where the actual demonstration was going on.

"There can't be anyone in the room, because of radiation
burns," explained Arcot, junior. "We could have surrounded
the thing with relux, but then you couldn't have seen what's
going on.

"I'm not going to explain anything beforehand; like magic,
they'll be more astounding before the explanation is given."

He touched a switch. The cameras began to operate, and
the screen sprang into life.

The screen showed a heavy table on which was mounted
a small projector that looked something like a searchlight
with several heavy cables running into it. In the path of the
projector was a large lux metal crucible surrounded by a
ring of relux, and a series of points of relux aimed into the
crucible. These points and the ring were grounded. Inside
the crucible was a small ingot of coronium, the strong,
hard, Venerian metal which melted at twenty-five hundred
degrees centigrade and boiled at better than four thousand.
The crucible was entirely enclosed in a large lux metal case
which was lined, on the side away from the projector, with
roughened relux.

Arcot moved a switch on the control panel. Far below
them, a heavy relay slammed home, and suddenly a solid
beam of brilliant bluish light shot out from the projector,
a beam so brilliant that the entire screen was lit by the
intense glow, and the spectators thought that they could
almost feel the heat.

It passed through the lux metal case and through the
coronium bar, only to be cut off by the relux liner, which,
since it was rough, absorbed over ninety-nine percent of the
rays that struck it.

The coronium bar glowed red, orange, yellow, and white
in quick succession, then suddenly slumped into a molten
mass in the bottom of the crucible.

The crucible was filled now with a mass of molten metal
that glowed intensely white and seethed furiously. The
slowly rising vapors told of the rapid boiling, and their
settling showed that their temperature was too high to permit
them to remain hot—the heat radiated away too fast.

For perhaps ten seconds this went on, then suddenly a
new factor was added to the performance. There was a
sudden crashing arc and a blaze of blue flame that swept in
a cyclonic twisting motion inside the crucible. The blaze of
the arc, the intense brilliance of the incandescent metal,
and the weird light of the beam of radiation shifted in a fantastic
play of colors. It made a strange and impressive scene.

Suddenly the relay sounded again; the beam of radiance
disappeared as quickly as it had come. In an instant, the blue
violet glare of the relux plate had subsided to an angry
red. The violent arcing had stopped, and the metal was
cooling rapidly. A heavy purplish vapor in the crucible
condensed on the walls into black, flakey crystals.

The elder Arcot was watching the scene in the screen
curiously. "I wonder—" he said slowly. "As a physicist, I
should say it was impossible, but if it did happen, I should
imagine these would be the results." He turned to look at
Arcot junior. "Well, go on with your exhibition, son."

"I want to know your ideas when we're through, though,
Dad," said the younger man. "The next on the program is
a little more interesting, perhaps. At least it demonstrates
a more commercial aspect of the thing."

The younger Morey was operating the controls of the
handling robots. On the screen, a machine rolled in on caterpillar
treads, picked up the lux case and its contents, and
carried them off.

A minute later, it reappeared with a large electromagnet
and a relux plate, to which were attached a huge pair of
silver busbars. The relux plate was set in a stand directly in
front of the projector, and the big electromagnet was set up
directly behind the relux plate. The magnet leads were connected,
and a coil, in the form of two toruses intersecting at
right angles enclosed in a form-fitting relux case, had been
connected to the heavy terminals of the relux plate. An
ammeter and a heavy coil of coronium wire were connected
in series with the coil, and a kilovoltmeter was connected
across the terminals of the relux plate.

As soon as the connections were completed, the robot
backed swiftly out of the room, and Arcot turned on the
magnet and the ray projector. Instantly, there was a sharp
deflection of the kilovoltmeter.

"I haven't yet closed the switch leading into the coil," he
explained, "so there's no current." The ammeter needle hadn't
moved.

Despite the fact that the voltmeter seemed to be shorted
out by the relux plate, the needle pointed steadily at twenty-two.
Arcot changed the current through the magnet, and
the reading dropped to twenty.

The rays had been on at very low power, the air only
slightly ionized, but as Arcot turned a rheostat, the intensity
increased, and the air in the path of the beam shone with
an intense blue. The relux plate, subject now to eddy currents,
since there was no other path for the energy to take,
began to heat up rapidly.

"I'm going to close the switch into the coil now," said
Arcot. "Watch the meters."

A relay snapped, and instantly the ammeter jumped to
read 4500 amperes. The voltmeter gave a slight kick, then
remained steady. The heavy coronium spring grew warm
and began to glow dully, while the ammeter dropped slightly
because of the increased resistance. The relux plate cooled
slightly, and the voltmeter remained steady.

"The coil you see is storing the energy that is flowing
into it," Arcot explained. "Notice that the coronium resistor
is increasing its resistance, but otherwise there is little increase
in the back E.M.F. The energy is coming from the
rays which strike the polarized relux plate to give the current."

He paused a moment to make slight adjustments in the
controls, then turned his attention back to the screen.

The kilovoltmeter still read twenty.

"Forty-five hundred amperes at twenty thousand volts,"
the elder Arcot said softly. "Where is it going?"

"Take a look at the space within the right angle of the
torus coils," said Arcot junior. "It's getting dark in there despite
the powerful light shed by the ionized air."

Indeed, the space within the twin coils was rapidly growing
dark; it was darkening the image of the things behind
it, oddly blurring their outlines. In a moment, the images
were completely wiped out, and the region within the coils
was filled with a strangely solid blackness.

"According to the instruments," young Arcot said, "we
have stored fifteen thousand kilowatt hours of energy in that
coil and there seems to be no limit to how much power we
can get into it. Just from the power it contains, that coil
is worth about forty dollars right now, figured at a quarter
of a cent per kilowatt hour.

"I haven't been using anywhere near the power I can
get out of this apparatus, either. Watch." He threw another
switch which shorted around the coronium resistor and the
ammeter, allowing the current to run into the coil directly
from the plate.

"I don't have a direct reading on this," he explained,
"but an indirect reading from the magnetic field in that
room shows a current of nearly a hundred million amperes!"

The younger Morey had been watching a panel of meters
on the other side of the screen. Suddenly, he shouted: "Cut
it, Arcot! The conductors are setting up a secondary field
in the plate and causing trouble."

Instantly, Arcot's hand went to a switch. A relay slammed
open, and the ray projector died.

The power coil still held its field of enigmatic blackness.

"Watch this," Arcot instructed. Under his expert manipulation,
a small robot handler rolled into the room. It had
a pair of pliers clutched in one claw. The spectators watched
the screen in fascination as the robot drew back its arm and
hurled the pliers at the black field with all its might. The
pliers struck the blackness and rebounded as if they had hit
a rubber wall. Arcot caused the little machine to pick up
the pliers and repeat the process.

Arcot grinned. "I've cut off the power to the coil. Unlike
the ordinary induction coil, it isn't necessary to keep supplying
power to the thing; it's a static condition.

"You can see for yourself how much energy it holds. It's
a handy little gadget, isn't it?" He shut off the rest of the
instruments and the television screen, then turned to his
father.

"The demonstration is over. Got any theories, Dad?"

The elder Dr. Arcot frowned in thought. "The only thing
I can think of that would produce an effect like that is a
stream of positrons—or contraterrene nuclei. That would explain
not only the heating, but the electrical display.

"As far as the coil goes, that's easy to understand. Any
energy storage device stores energy in the strain in space; here
you can actually see the strain in space." Then he smiled
at his son. "I see my ex-laboratory assistant has come a long
way. You've achieved controlled, usable atomic energy
through total annihilation of mass. Right?"

Arcot smiled back and nodded. "Right, Dad."

"Son, I wonder if you'd give me your data sheets on that
process. I'd like to work out some of the mathematical problems
involved."

"Sure, Dad. But right now—" Arcot turned toward the
elder Mr. Morey. "—I'm more interested in the mathematics
of finance. We have a proposition to put to you, Mr. Morey,
and that proposition, simply stated, is—"

Perhaps it was simply stated, but it took fully an hour
for Arcot, Wade, and Morey to discuss the science of it
with the two older men, and Fuller spent another hour
over the carefully drawn plans for the ship.

At last, the elder Mr. Morey settled back and looked vacantly
at the ceiling. They were seated now in the conference
room of Transcontinental Airways.

"Well, boys," said Mr. Morey, "as usual, I'm in a position
where I'm forced to yield. I might refuse financial backing,
but you could sell any one of those gadgets for close to a
billion dollars and finance the expedition independently, or
you could, with your names, request the money publicly
and back it that way." He paused a moment. "I am, however,
thinking more in terms of your safety than in terms of money."
There was another long pause, then he smiled at the four
younger men.

"I think, however, that we can trust you. Armed with
cosmic and molecular rays, you should be able to put up
a fair scrap anywhere. Also, I have never detected any
signs of feeblemindedness in any of you; I don't think you'll
get yourselves in a jam you can't get out of. I'll back you."

"I hate to interrupt your exuberance," said the elder Dr.
Arcot, "but I should like to know the name of this remarkable
ship."

"What?" asked Wade. "Name? Oh, it hasn't any."

The elder Morey shook his head sadly. "That is indeed
an important oversight. If a crew of men can overlook so
fundamental a thing, I wonder if they are to be trusted."

"Well, what are we going to call it, then?" asked Arcot.

"Solarite II might do," suggested Morey. "It will still be
from the Solar System."

"I think we should be more broadminded," said Arcot.
"We aren't going to stay in this system—not even in this
galaxy. We might call it the Galaxian."

"Did you say broadminded?" asked Wade. "Let's really
be broad and call it the Universite or something like that.
Or, better yet, call it Fluorine! That's everywhere in the
universe and the most active element there is. This ship will
go everywhere in the universe and be the most active thing
that ever existed!"

"A good name!" said the elder Morey. "That gets my
vote!"

Young Arcot looked thoughtful. "That's mighty good—I
like the idea—but it lacks ring." He paused, then, looking
up at the ceiling, repeated slowly:

"Alone, alone, all, all alone;

Alone on a wide, wide sea;

Nor any saint took pity on

My soul in agony."

He rose and walked over to the window, looking out
where the bright points of light that were the stars of space
rode high in the deep violet of the moonlit sky.

"The sea of all space—the sea of vastness that lies between
the far-flung nebulae—the mighty void—alone on a
sea, the vastness of which no man can imagine—alone—alone
where no other man has been; alone, so far from
all matter, from all mankind, that not even light, racing at
billions of miles each day, could reach home in less than
a million years." Arcot stopped and stood looking out of the
window.

Morey broke the silence. "The Ancient Mariner." He
paused. "'Alone' will certainly be right. I think that name
takes all the prizes."

Fuller nodded slowly. "I certainly agree. The Ancient
Mariner. It's kind of long, but it is the name."

It was adopted unanimously.

IV

The Ancient Mariner was built in the big Transcontinental
shops in Newark; the power they needed was not available
in the smaller shops.

Working twenty-four hours a day, in three shifts, skilled
men took two months to finish the hull according to Fuller's
specifications. The huge walls of lux metal required great
care in construction, for they could not be welded; they
had to be formed in position. And they could only be
polished under powerful magnets, where the dense magnetic
field softened the lux metal enough to allow a diamond
polisher to do the job.

When the hull was finished, there came the laborious
work of installing the power plant and the tremendous power
leads, the connectors, the circuits to the relays—a thousand
complex circuits.

Much of it was standard: the molecular power tubes, the
molecular ray projectors, the power tubes for the invisibility
apparatus, and many other parts. All the relays were standard,
the gyroscopic stabilizers were standard, and the electromagnetic
braking equipment for the gyros was standard.

But there would be long days of work ahead for Arcot,
Wade, and Morey, for only they could install the special
equipment; only they could put in the complicated wiring,
for no one else on Earth understood the circuits they had
to establish.

During the weeks of waiting, Arcot and his friends
worked on auxiliary devices to be used with the ship. They
wanted to make some improvements on the old molecular
ray pistols, and to develop atomic powered heat projectors
for hand use. The primary power they stored in small space-strain
coils in the handgrip of the pistol. Despite their
small size, the coils were capable of storing power for thirty
hours of continuous operation of the rays. The finished
weapon was scarcely larger than a standard molecular ray
pistol.

Arcot pointed out that many of the planets they might
visit would be larger than Earth, and they lacked any
way of getting about readily under high gravity. Since
something had to be done about that, Arcot did it. He
demonstrated it to his friends one day in the shop yard.

Morey and Wade had just been in to see Fuller about
some details of the ship, and as they came out, Arcot called
them over to his work bench. He was wearing a space suit
without the helmet.

The modern space suit is made of woven lux metal wires
of extremely small diameter and airproofed with a rubberoid
fluorocarbon plastic, and furnished with air and heating units.
Made as it was, it offered protection nothing else could offer;
it was almost a perfect insulator and was resistant to
the attack of any chemical reagent. Not even elemental fluorine
could corrode it. And the extreme strength of the lux
metal fiber made it stronger, pound for pound, than steel or
coronium.

On Arcot's back was a pack of relux plated metal. It
was connected by relux web belts to a broad belt that
circled Arcot's waist. One thin cable ran down the right
arm to a small relux tube about eight inches long by two
inches in diameter.

"Watch!" Arcot said, grinning.

He reached to his belt and flipped a little switch.

"So long! See you later!" He pointed his right arm toward
the ceiling and sailed lightly into the air. He lowered the
angle of his arm and moved smoothly across the huge hangar,
floating toward the shining bulk of the rapidly forming
Ancient Mariner. He circled the room, rising and sinking at
will, then headed for the open door.

"Come out and watch me where there's more room," he
called.

Out in the open, he darted high up into the air until he
was a mere speck in the sky. Then he suddenly came dropping
down and landed lightly before them, swaying on his
feet and poised lightly on his toes.

"Some jump," said Morey, in mock surprise.

"Yeah," agreed Fuller. "Try again."

"Or," Wade put in, "give me that weight annihilator and
I'll beat you at your own game. What's the secret?"

"That's a cute gadget. How much load does it carry?"
asked Morey, more practically.

"I can develop about ten tons as far as it goes, but the
human body can't take more than five gravities, so we can
only visit planets with less than that surface gravity. The
principle is easy to see; I'll show you."

He unhooked the cables and took the power pack from
his back. "The main thing is the molecular power unit here,
electrically heated and mounted on a small, massive gyroscope.
That gyro is necessary, too. I tried leaving it out and
almost took a nosedive. I had it coupled directly to the body
and leaned forward a little bit when I was in the air. Without
a gyro to keep the drive upright, I took a loop and
started heading for the ground. I had to do some fancy
gymnastics to keep from ending up six feet under—literally.

"The power is all generated in the pack with a small
power plate and several storage coils. I've also got it hooked
to these holsters at my belt so we can charge the pistols
while we carry them.

"The control is this secondary power cable running down
my arm to my hand. That gives you your direction, and the
rheostat here at the belt changes the velocity.

"I've only made this one so far, but I've ordered six others
like it. I thought you guys might like one, too."

"I think you guessed right!" said Morey, looking inside
the power case. "Hey! Why all the extra room in the case?"

"It's an unperfected invention as yet; we might want to
put some more stuff in there for our own private use."

Each of the men tried out the apparatus and found it
quite satisfactory.

Meanwhile, there was other work to be done.

Wade had been given the job of gathering the necessary
food and anything else in the way of supplies that he might
think of. Arcot was collecting the necessary spare parts and
apparatus. Morey was gathering a small library and equipping
a chemistry laboratory. Fuller was to get together the
necessary standard equipment for the ship—tables, seats,
bunks, and other furniture.

It took months of work, and it seemed it would never
be finished, but finally, one clear, warm day in August, the
ship was completely equipped and ready to go.

On the last inspection, the elder Dr. Arcot and the elder
Mr. Morey went with the four younger men. They stood
beside the great intergalactic cruiser, looking up at its shining
hull.

"We came a bit later than we expected, son," said Dr.
Arcot, "but we still expect a good show." He paused and
frowned, "I understand you don't intend to take any trial
trip. What's the idea?"

Arcot had been afraid his father would be worried about
that, so he framed his explanation carefully. "Dad, we figured
this ship out to the last decimal place; it's the best we
can make it. Remember, the molecular motion drive will
get a trial first; we'll give it a trial trip when we leave the
sun. If there's any trouble, naturally, we'll return. But the
equipment is standard, so we're expecting no trouble.

"The only part that would require a trial trip is the space-control
apparatus, and there's no way to give that a trial
trip. Remember, we have to get far enough out from the
sun so that the gravitational field will be weak enough for
the drive to overcome it. If we tried it this close, we'd just
be trying to neutralize the sun's gravity. We'd be pouring
out energy, wasting a great deal of it; but out away from
the sun, we'll get most of the energy back.

"On the other hand, when we do get out and get started
we will go faster than light, and we'd be hopelessly beyond
the range of the molecular motion drive in an instant. In
other words, if the space-control drive doesn't work, we
can't come back, and if it does work, there's no need to come
back.

"And if anything goes wrong, we're the only ones who
could fix it, anyway. If anything goes wrong, I'll radio
Earth. You ought to be able to hear from me in about a
dozen years." He smiled suddenly. "Say! We might go out
and get back here in time to hear ourselves talking!

"But you can see why we felt that there was little reason
for a trial trip. If it's a failure, we'll never be back to say
so; if it isn't, we'll be able to continue."

His father still looked worried, but he nodded in acquiescence.
"Perfect logic, son, but I guess we may as well
give up the discussion. Personally, I don't like it. Let's
see this ship of yours."

The great hull was two hundred feet long and thirty
feet in diameter. The outer wall, one foot of solid lux metal,
was separated from the inner, one-inch relux wall by a two
inch gap which would be evacuated in space. The two
walls were joined in many places by small lux metal cross-braces.
The windows consisted of spaces in the relux wall,
allowing the occupants to see through the transparent lux
hull.

From the outside, it was difficult to detect the exact outline
of the ship, for the clear lux metal was practically invisible
and the foot of it that surrounded the more visible
part of the ship gave a curious optical illusion. The perfect
reflecting ability of the relux made the inner hull difficult
to see, too. It was more by absence than presence that one
detected it; it blotted out things behind it.

The great window of the pilot room disclosed the pilot
seats and the great switchboard to one side. Each of the
windows was equipped with a relux shield that slid into
position at the touch of a switch, and these were already
in place over the observatory window, so only the long,
narrow portholes showed the lighted interior.

For some minutes, the elder men stood looking at the
graceful beauty of the ship.

"Come on in—see the inside," suggested Fuller.

They entered through the airlock close to the base of the
ship. The heavy lux door was opened by automatic machinery
from the inside, but the combination depended
on the use of a molecular ray and the knowledge of the
correct place, which made it impossible for anyone to open
it unless they had the ray and knew where to use it.

From the airlock, they went directly to the power room.
Here they heard the soft purring of a large oscillator tube
and the indistinguishable murmur of smoothly running AC
generators powered by large contraterrene reactors.

The elder Dr. Arcot glanced in surprise at the heavy-duty
ammeter in a control panel.

"Half a billion amperes! Good Lord! Where is all that
power going?" He looked at his son.

"Into the storage coils. It's going in at ten kilovolts, so
that's a five billion kilowatt supply. It's been going for
half an hour and has half an hour to run. It takes two
tons of matter to charge the coil to capacity, and we're
carrying twenty tons of fuel—enough for ten charges. We
shouldn't need more than three tons if all goes well, but 'all'
seldom does.

"See that large black cylinder up there?" Arcot asked,
pointing.

Above them, lying along the roof of the power room, lay
a great black cylinder nearly two feet in diameter and extending
out through the wall in the rear. It was made
integral with two giant lux metal beams that reached to
the bow of the ship in a long, sweeping curve. From one
of the power switchboards, two heavy cables ran up to
the giant cylinder.

"That's the main horizontal power unit. We can develop
an acceleration of ten gravities either forward or backward.
In the curve of the ship, on top, sides, and bottom, there
are power units for motion in the other two directions.

"Most of the rest of the stuff in this section is old hat
to you, though. Come on into the next room."

Arcot opened the heavy relux door, leading the way into
the next room, which was twice the size of the power room.
The center of the floor was occupied by a heavy pedestal of
lux metal upon which was a huge, relux-encased, double
torus storage coil. There was a large switchboard at the
opposite end, while around the room, in ordered groups,
stood the familiar double coils, each five feet in diameter.
The space within them was already darkening.

"Well," said Arcot, senior, "that's some battery of power
coils, considering the amount of energy one can store. But
what's the big one for?"

"That's the main space control," the younger Arcot answered.
"While our power is stored in the smaller ones,
we can shoot it into this one, which, you will notice, is constructed
slightly differently. Instead of holding the field
within it, completely enclosed, the big one will affect all
the space about it. We will then be enclosed in what might
be called a hyperspace of our own making."

"I see," said his father. "You go into hyperspace and
move at any speed you please. But how will you see where
you're going?"

"We won't, as far as I know. I don't expect to see a thing
while we're in that hyperspace. We'll simply aim the ship
in the direction we want to go and then go into hyperspace.
The only thing we have to avoid is stars; their gravitational
fields would drain the energy out of the apparatus
and we'd end up in the center of a white-hot star. Meteors
and such, we don't have to worry about; their fields
aren't strong enough to drain the coils, and since we
won't be in normal space, we can't hit them."

The elder Morey looked worried. "If you can't see your
way back you'll get lost! And you can't radio back for help."

"Worse than that!" said Arcot. "We couldn't receive a
signal of any kind after we get more than three hundred
light years away; there weren't any radios before that.

"What we'll do is locate ourselves through the sun's
light. We'll take photographs every so often and orient ourselves
by them when we come back."

"That sounds like an excellent method of stellar navigation,"
agreed Morey senior. "Let's see the rest of the ship."
He turned and walked toward the farther door.

The next room was the laboratory. On one side of the
room was a complete physics lab and on the other was a
well-stocked and well-equipped chemistry lab. They could
perform many experiments here that no man had been able
to perform due to lack of power. In this ship they had
more generating facilities than all the power stations of
Earth combined!

Arcot opened the next door. "This next room is the physics
and chemistry storeroom. Here we have a duplicate—in
some cases, six or seven duplicates—of every piece of apparatus
on board, and plenty of material to make more.
Actually, we have enough equipment to make a new ship
out of what we have here. It would be a good deal smaller,
but it would work.

"The greater part of our materials is stored in the curvature
of the ship, where it will be easy to get at if necessary.
All our water and food is there, and the emergency oxygen
tanks.

"Now let's take the stairway to the upper deck."

The upper deck was the main living quarters. There were
several small rooms on each side of the corridor down
the center; at the extreme nose was the control room, and
at the extreme stern was the observatory. The observatory
was equipped with a small but exceedingly powerful telectroscope,
developed from those the Nigrans had left on one
of the deserted planets Sol had captured in return for the
loss of Pluto to the Black Star. The arc commanded by the
instrument was not great, but it was easy to turn the ship
about, and most of their observations could be made without
trouble.

Each of the men had a room of his own; there was a
small galley and a library equipped with all the books the
four men could think of as being useful. The books and all
other equipment were clamped in place to keep them from
flying around loose when the ship accelerated.

The control room at the nose was surrounded by a hemisphere
of transparent lux metal which enabled them to see
in every direction except directly behind, and even that blind
spot could be covered by stationing a man in the observatory.

There were heat projectors and molecular ray projectors,
each operated from the control room in the nose. To complete
the armament, there were more projectors in the stern,
controlled from the observatory, and a set on either side
controlled from the library and the galley.

The ship was provisioned for two years—two years without
stops. With the possibility of stopping on other planets,
the four men could exist indefinitely in the ship.

After the two older men had been shown all through the
intergalactic vessel, the elder Arcot turned to his old friend.
"Morey, it looks as if it was time for us to leave the Ancient
Mariner to her pilots!"

"I guess you're right. Well—I'll just say goodbye—but
you all know there's a lot more I could say." Morey senior
looked at them and started toward the airlock.

"Goodbye, son," said the elder Arcot. "Goodbye, men.
I'll be expecting you any time within two years. We can
have no warning, I suppose; your ship will outrace the radio
beam. Goodbye." Dr. Arcot joined his old friend and they
went outside.

The heavy lux metal door slid into place behind them,
and the thick plastic cushions sealed the entrance to the
airlock.

The workmen and the other personnel around the ship
cleared the area and stood well back from the great hull.
The two older men waved to the men inside the ship.

Suddenly the ship trembled, and rose toward the sky.

V

Arcot, at the controls of the Ancient Mariner, increased
the acceleration as the ship speared up toward interplanetary
space. Soon, the deep blue of the sky had given way
to an intense violet, and this faded to the utter black of
space as the ship drew away from the planet that was
its home.

"That lump of dust there is going to look mighty little
when we get back," said Wade softly.

"But," Arcot reminded him, "that little lump of dust is
going to pull us across a distance that our imaginations can't
conceive of. And we'll be darned happy to see that pale
globe swinging in space when we get back—provided, of
course, that we do get back."

The ship was straining forward now under the pull of
its molecular motion power units, accelerating at a steady
rate, rapidly increasing the distance between the ship and
Earth.

The cosmic ray power generators were still charging the
coils, preventing the use of the space strain drive. Indeed, it
would be a good many hours before they would be far
enough from the sun to throw the ship into hyperspace.

In the meantime, Morey was methodically checking every
control as Arcot called out the readings on the control panel.
Everything was working to perfection. Their every calculation
had checked out in practice so far. But the real test
was yet to come.

They were well beyond the orbit of Pluto when they decided
they would be safe in using the space strain drive and
throwing the ship into hyperspace.

Morey was in the hyperspace control room, watching the
instruments there. They were ready!

"Hold on!" called Arcot. "Here we go—if at all!" He
reached out to the control panel before him and touched
the green switch that controlled the molecular motion machines.
The big power tubes cut off, and their acceleration
ceased. His fingers pushed a brilliant red switch—there was
a dull, muffled thud as a huge relay snapped shut.

Suddenly, a strange tingling feeling of power ran through
them—space around them was suddenly black. The lights
dimmed for an instant as the titanic current that flowed
through the gigantic conductors set up a terrific magnetic
field, reacting with the absorption plates. The power seemed
to climb rapidly to a maximum—then, quite suddenly, it
was gone.

The ship was quiet. No one spoke. The meters, which
had flashed over to their limits, had dropped back to zero
once more, except those which indicated the power stored in
the giant coil. The stars that had shone brilliantly around
them in a myriad of colors were gone. The space around
them glowed strangely, and there was a vast cloud of strange,
violet or pale green stars before them. Directly ahead was
one green star that glowed big and brilliant, then it faded
rapidly and shrank to a tiny dot—a distant star. There was
a strange tenseness about the men; they seemed held in an
odd, compelled silence.

Arcot reached forward again. "Cutting off power, Morey!"
The red tumbler snapped back. Again space seemed to be
charged with a vast surplus of energy that rushed in from
all around, coursing through their bodies, producing a tingling
feeling. Then space rocked in a gray cloud about them;
the stars leaped out at them in blazing glory again.

"Well, it worked once!" breathed Arcot with a sigh of
relief. "Lord, I made some errors in calculation, though! I
hope I didn't make any more! Morey—how was it? I only
used one-sixteenth power."

"Well, don't use any more, then," said Morey. "We sure
traveled! The things worked perfectly. By the way, it's a
good thing we had all the relays magnetically shielded; the
magnetic field down here was so strong that my pocket kit
tried to start running circles around it.

"According to your magnetic drag meter, the conductors
were carrying over fifty billion amperes. The small coils
worked perfectly. They're charged again; the power went
back into them from the big coil with only a five percent
loss of power—about twenty thousand megawatts."

"Hey, Arcot," Wade said. "I thought you said we wouldn't
be able to see the stars."

Arcot spread his hands. "I did say that, and all my
apologies for it. But we're not seeing them by light. The
stars all have projections—shadows—in this space because
of their intense gravitational fields. There are probably slight
fluctuations in the field, perhaps one every minute or so.
Since we were approaching them at twenty thousand times
the speed of light, the Doppler effect gives us what looks
like violet light.

"We saw the stars in front of us as violet points. The
green ones were actually behind us, and the green light was
tremendously reduced in frequency. It certainly can't be
anything less than gamma rays and probably even of greater
frequency.

"Did you notice there were no stars off to the side? We
weren't approaching them, so they didn't give either effect."

"How did you know which was which?" asked Fuller skeptically.

"Did you see that green star directly ahead of us?" Arcot
asked. "The one that dwindled so rapidly? That could only
have been the sun, since the sun was the only star close
enough to show up as a disc. Since it was green and I
knew it was behind us, I decided that all the green ones
were behind us. It isn't proof, but it's a good indication."

"You win, as usual," admitted Fuller.

"Well, where are we?" asked Wade. "I think that's more
important."

"I haven't the least idea," confessed Arcot. "Let's see if
we can find out. I've got the robot pilot on, so we can
leave the ship to itself. Let's take a look at Old Sol from a
distance that no man ever reached before!"

They started for the observatory. Morey joined them and
Arcot put the view of Sol and his family on the telectroscope
screen. He increased the magnification to maximum,
and the four men looked eagerly at the system. The sun
glowed brilliantly, and the planets showed plainly.

"Now, if we wanted to take the trouble, we could calculate
when the planets were in that position and determine
the distance we have come. However, I notice that Pluto
is still in place, so that means we are seeing the Solar System
as it was before the passing of the Black Star. We're at
least two light years away."

"More than that," said Morey. He pointed at the screen.
"See here, how Mars is placed in relation to Venus and
Earth? The planets were in that configuration seven years
ago. We're seven light years from Earth."

"Good enough!" Arcot grinned. "That means we're within
two light years of Sirius, since we were headed in that
direction. Let's turn the ship so we can take a look at it
with the telectroscope."

Since the power had been cut off, the ship was in free
fall, and the men were weightless. Arcot didn't try to walk
toward the control room; he simply pushed against the wall
with his feet and made a long, slow dive for his destination.

The others reached for the handgrips in the walls while
Arcot swung the ship gently around so that its stern was
pointed toward Sirius. Because of its brilliance and relative
proximity to Sol, Sirius is the brightest star in the heavens,
as seen from Earth. At this much lesser distance, it shone
as a brilliant point of light that blazed wonderfully. They
turned the telectroscope toward it, but there was little they
could see that was not visible from the big observatory on
the Moon.

"I think we may as well go nearer," suggested Morey,
"and see what we find on close range observation. Meanwhile,
turn the ship back around and I'll take some pictures
of the sun and its surrounding star field from this distance.
Our only way of getting back is going to be this series of
pictures, so I think we had best make it complete. For the
first light century, we ought to take a picture every ten light
years, and after that one each light century until we reach
a point where we are only getting diminishing pictures of
the local star cluster. After that, we can wait until we
reach the edge of the Galaxy."

"Sounds all right to me," agreed Arcot. "After all, you're
the astronomer, I'm not. To tell you the truth, I'd have to
search a while to find Old Sol again. I can't see just where
he is. Of course, I could locate him by means of the gyroscope
settings, but I'm afraid I wouldn't find him so easily
visually."

"Say! You sure are a fine one to pilot an expedition in
space!" cried Wade in mock horror. "I think we ought to
demote him for that! Imagine! He plans a trip of a thousand
million light years, and then gets us out seven light
years and says he doesn't know where he is! Doesn't even
know where home is! I'm glad we have a cautious man like
Morey along." He shook his head sadly.

They took a series of six plates of the sun, using different
magnifications.

"These plates will help prove our story, too," said Morey
as he looked at the finished plates. "We might have gone
only a little way into space, up from the plane of the
ecliptic and taken plates through a wide angle camera. But
we'd have had to go at least seven years into the past to
get a picture like this."

The new self-developing short-exposure plates, while not
in perfect color balance, were more desirable for this work,
since they took less time on exposure.

Morey and the others joined Arcot in the control room
and strapped themselves into the cushioned seats. Since the
space strain mechanism had proved itself in the first test,
they felt they needed no more observations than they could
make from the control room meters.

Arcot gazed out at the spot that was their immediate
goal and said slowly: "How much bigger than Sol is that
star, Morey?"

"It all depends on how you measure size," Morey replied.
"It is two and a half times as heavy, has four times the
volume, and radiates twenty-five times as much light. In
other words, one hundred million tons of matter disappear
each second in that star.

"That's for Sirius A, of course. Sirius B, its companion,
is a different matter; it's a white dwarf. It has only one
one-hundred-twenty-five-thousandths the volume of Sirius
A, but it weighs one third as much. It radiates more per
square inch than our sun, but, due to its tiny size, it is
very faint. That star, though almost as massive as the sun,
is only about the size of Earth."

"You sure have those statistics down pat!" said Fuller,
laughing. "But I must say they're interesting. What's that
star made of, anyway? Solid lux metal?"

"Hardly!" Morey replied. "Lux metal has a density of
around 103, while this star has a density so high that one
cubic inch of its matter would weigh a ton on Earth."

"Wow!" Wade ejaculated. "I'd hate to drop a baseball on
my toe on that star!"

"It wouldn't hurt you," Arcot said, smiling. "If you could
lift the darned thing, you ought to be tough enough to
stand dropping it on your toe. Remember, it would weigh
about two hundred tons! Think you could handle it?"

"At any rate, here we go. When we get there, you can
get out and try it."

Again came the shock of the start. The heavens seemed
to reel about them; the bright spot of Sirius was a brilliant
violet point that swelled like an expanding balloon, spreading
out until it filled a large angle.

Then again the heavens reeled, and they were still. The
control room was filled with a dazzling splendor of brilliant
blue-white light, and an intense heat beat in upon them.

"Brother! Feel that heat," said Arcot in awe. "We'd better
watch ourselves; that thing is giving off plenty of ultraviolet.
We could end up with third-degree sunburns if we're not
careful." Suddenly he stopped and looked around in surprise.
"Hey! Morey! I thought you said this was a double star!
Look over there! That's no white dwarf—it's a planet!"

"Ridiculous!" snapped Morey. "It's impossible for a planet
to be in equilibrium about a double star! But—" He paused,
bewildered. "But it is a planet! But—but it can't be! We've
made too many measurements on this star to make it possible!"

"I don't give a hang whether it can or not," Wade said
coolly, "the fact remains that it is. Looks as if that shoots
a whole flock of holes in that bedtime story you were telling
us about a superdense star."

"I make a motion we look more closely first," said Fuller,
quite logically.

But at first the telectroscope only served to confuse them
more. It was most certainly a planet, and they had a strange,
vague feeling of having seen it before.

Arcot mentioned this, and Wade launched into a long,
pedantic discussion of how the left and right hemispheres
of the brain get out of step at times, causing a sensation of
having seen a thing before when it was impossible to have
seen it previously.

Arcot gave Wade a long, withering stare and then pushed
himself into the library without saying a word. A moment
later, he was back with a large volume entitled: "The Astronomy
of the Nigran Invasion," by D. K. Harkness. He
opened the volume to a full-page photograph of the third
planet of the Black Star as taken from a space cruiser
circling the planet. Silently, he pointed to it and to the image
swimming on the screen of the telectroscope.

"Good Lord!" said Wade in astonished surprise. "It's impossible!
We came here faster than light, and that planet
got here first!"

"As you so brilliantly remarked a moment ago," Arcot
pointed out, "I don't give a hang whether it can or not—it
is. How they did it, I don't know, but it does clear up a
number of things. According to the records we found, the
ancient Nigrans had a force ray that could move planets
from their orbits. I wonder if it couldn't be used to break
up a double star? Also, we know their scientists were looking
for a method of moving faster than light; if we can do
it, so could they. They just moved their whole system of
planets over here after getting rid of the upsetting influence
of the white dwarf."

"Perfect!" exclaimed Morey enthusiastically. "It explains
everything."

"Except that we saw that companion star when we
stopped back there, half an hour ago," said Fuller.

"Not half an hour ago," Arcot contradicted. "Two years
ago. We saw the light that left the companion before it
was moved. It's rather like traveling in time."

"If that's so," asked Fuller, suddenly worried, "what is
our time in relation to Earth?"

"If we moved by the space-strain drive at all times,"
Arcot explained, "we would return at exactly the same time
we left. Time is passing normally on Earth as it is with us
right now, but whenever we use the space-strain, we move
instantaneously from one point to another as far as Earth
and the rest of the universe is concerned. It seems to take
time to us because we are within the influence of the field.

"Suppose we were to take a trip that required a week.
In other words, three days traveling in space-strain, a day
to look at the destination, and three more days coming back.
When we returned to Earth, they would insist we had only
been gone one day, the time we spent out of the drive.
See?"

"I catch," said Fuller. "By the way, shouldn't we take
some photographs of this system? Otherwise, Earth won't
get the news for several years yet."

"Right," agreed Morey. "And we might as well look for
the other planets of the Black Star, too."

They made several plates, continuing their observations
until all the planets had been located, even old Pluto,
where crews of Nigran technicians were obviously at work,
building giant structures of lux metal. The great cities of
the Nigrans were beginning to bloom on the once bleak
plains of the planet. The mighty blaze of Sirius had warmed
Pluto, vaporizing its atmosphere and thawing its seas. The
planet that the Black Star had stolen from the Solar System
was warmer than it had been for two billion years.

"Well, that's it," said Arcot when they had finished taking
the necessary photographs. "We can prove we went
faster than light easily, now. The astronomers can take up
the work of classifying the planets and getting details of the
orbits when we get back.

"Since the Nigrans now have a sun of their own, there
should be no reason for hostility between our race and theirs.
Perhaps we can start commercial trade with them. Imagine!
Commerce over quintillions of miles of space!"

"And," interrupted Wade, "they can make the trip to
this system in less time than it takes to get to Venus!"

"Meanwhile," said Morey, "let's get on with our own exploration."

They strapped themselves into the control seats once more
and Arcot threw in the molecular drive to take them away
from the sun toward which they had been falling.

When the great, hot disc of Sirius had once more diminished
to a tiny white pinhead of light, Arcot turned the
ship until old Sol once more showed plainly on the cross-hairs
of the aiming telescope in the rear of the vessel.

"Hold on," Arcot cautioned, "here we go again!"

Again he threw the little red tumbler that threw a flood
of energy into the coils. The space about them seemed to
shiver and grow dim.

Arcot had thrown more power into the coils this time,
so the stars ahead of them instead of appearing violet were
almost invisible; they were radiating in the ultra-violet now.
And the stars behind them, instead of appearing to be green,
had subsided to a dull red glow.

Arcot watched the dull red spark of Sirius become increasingly
dimmer. Then, quite suddenly, a pale violet disc
in front of them ballooned out of nowhere and slid off to
one side.

The spaceship reeled, perking the men around in the
control seats. Heavy safety relays thudded dully; the instruments
flickered under a suddenly rising surge of power—then
they were calm again. Arcot had snapped over the
power switch.

"That," he said quietly, "is not so good."

"Threw the gyroscopes, didn't it?" asked Morey, his voice
equally as quiet.

"It did—and I have no idea how far. We're off course
and we don't know which direction we're headed."

VI

"What's the matter?" asked Fuller anxiously.

Arcot pointed out the window at a red star that blazed
in the distance. "We got too near the field of gravity of that
young giant and he threw us for a loss. We drained out
three-fourths of the energy from our coils and lost our bearings
in the bargain. The attraction turned the gyroscopes
and threw the ship out of line, so we no longer know
where the sun is.

"Well, come on, Morey; all we can do is start a search.
At this distance, we'd best go by Sirius; it's brighter and
nearer." He looked at the instrument panel. "I was using
the next lowest power and I still couldn't avoid that monster.
This ship is just a little too hot to handle."

Their position was anything but pleasant. They must
pick out from the vast star field behind them the one star
that was home, not knowing exactly where it was. But they
had one tremendous help—the photographs of the star field
around Sol that they had taken at the last stop. All they had
to do was search for an area that matched their photographs.

They found the sun at last, after they had spotted Sirius,
but they had had to rotate the ship through nearly twenty-five
degrees to do it. After establishing their bearings, they
took new photographs for their files.

Meanwhile, Wade had been recharging the coils. When
he was finished, he reported the fact to Arcot.

"Fine," Arcot said. "And from now on, I'm going to use
the least possible amount of power. It certainly isn't safe
to use more."

They started for the control room, much relieved. Arcot
dived first, with Wade directly behind him. Wade decided
suddenly to go into his room and stopped himself by grabbing
a handhold. Morey, following close behind, bumped into
him and was brought to rest, while Wade was pushed into
his room.

But Fuller, coming last, slammed into Morey, who moved
forward with new velocity toward the control room, leaving
Fuller hanging at rest in the middle of the corridor.

"Hey, Morey!" he laughed. "Send me a skyhook! I'm
caught!" Isolated as he was in the middle of the corridor,
he couldn't push on anything and remained stranded.

"Go to sleep!" advised Morey. "It's the most comfortable
bed you'll find!"

Wade looked out of his room just then. "Well, if it
isn't old Weakmuscles Fuller! Weighs absolutely nothing and
is still so weak he can't push himself around."

"Come on, though, Morey—give me a hand—I got you
off dead center." Fuller flailed his hand helplessly.

"Use your brains, if you have any," said Morey, "and
see what you can do. Come on, Wade—we're going."

Since they were going to use the space control, they
would remain in free fall, and Fuller would remain helplessly
suspended in mid-air.

The air of the ship suddenly seemed supercharged with
energy as the space around them became gray; then the
stars were all before them. The ship was moving forward
again.

"Well, old pals," said Fuller, "at least I have traffic blocked
fairly well if I feel like it, so eventually you'd have to help
me. However—" He floundered clumsily as he removed
one of his foam-rubber space-boots, "—my brains tell me
that action is equal and opposite to reaction!" And he threw
the boot with all possible velocity toward Morey!

The reaction of the motion brought him slowly but surely
to a handhold in the wall.

In the meantime, the flying boot caught Morey in the
chest with a pronounced smack! as he struggled vainly to
avoid it. Handicapped by the lack of friction, his arms were
not quite powerful enough to move his mass as quickly as
his legs might have done, for his inertia was as great as
ever, so he didn't succeed in ducking.

"Round one!" called Arcot, laughing. "Won by Kid Fuller
on a TKO! It appears he has brains and knows how to use
them!"

"You win," laughed Morey. "I concede the battle!"

Arcot had cut off the space-strain drive by the time Fuller
reached the control room, and the men set about making
more observations. They took additional photographs and
turned on the drive again.

Time passed monotonously after they had examined a few
stars. There was little difference; each was but a scene of
flaming matter. There was little interest in this work, and,
as Fuller remarked, this was supposed to be a trip of exploration,
not observation. They weren't astronomers; they were
on a vacation. Why all the hard work? They couldn't do as
good a job as an experienced astronomer, so they decided
to limit their observations to those necessary to retrace their
path to Earth.

"But we want to investigate for planets to land on, don't
we?" asked Morey.

"Sure," agreed Fuller. "But do we have to hunt at random
for them? Can't we look for stars like our own sun?
Won't they be more apt to have planets like Sol's?"

"It's an idea," replied Morey.

"Well, why not try it then?" Fuller continued logically.
"Let's pick out a G-0 type sun and head for it."

They were now well out toward the edge of the Galaxy,
some thirty thousand light years from home. Since they had
originally headed out along the narrow diameter of the
lens-shaped mass of stars that forms our Island Universe,
they would reach the edge soon.

"We won't have much chance of finding a G-0 this far
out," Arcot pointed out. "We're about out of stars. We've
left most of the Galaxy behind us."

"Then let's go on to another of the galactic nebulae,"
said Morey, looking out into the almost unbroken night
of intergalactic space. Only here and there could they see
a star, separated from its nearest neighbor by thousands of
light years of empty space.

"You know," said Wade slowly, "I've been wondering
about the progress along scientific lines that a race out here
might make. I mean, suppose that one of those lonely stars
had planets, and suppose intelligent life evolved on one of
those planets. I think their progress would be much slower."

"I see what you mean," Arcot said. "To us, of Earth, the
stars are gigantic furnaces a few light years away. They're
titanic tests tubes of nature, with automatic reading devices
attached, hung in the sky for us to watch. We have learned
more about space from the stars than all the experiments of
the physicists of Earth ever secured for us. It was in the
atoms of the suns that we first counted the rate of revolutions
of the electrons about their nuclei."

"Couldn't they have watched their own sun?" Fuller asked.

"Sure, but what could they compare it with? They couldn't
see a white dwarf from here. They couldn't measure the parallax
to the nearest star, so they would have no idea of
stellar distances. They wouldn't know how bright S Doradus
was. Or how dim Van Maanen's star was."

"Then," Fuller said speculatively, "they'd have to wait
until one of their scientists invented the telectroscope."

Arcot shook his head. "Without a knowledge of nuclear
physics, the invention of the telectroscope is impossible. The
lack of opportunity to watch the stars that might teach them
something would delay their knowledge of atomic structure.
They might learn a great deal about chemistry and Newtonian
physics, and go quite a ways with math, but even
there they would be handicapped. Morey, for instance,
would never have developed the autointegral calculus, to
say nothing of tensor and spinor calculus, which were developed
two hundred years ago, without the knowledge of the
problems of space to develop the need. I'm afraid such a
race would be quite a bit behind us in science.

"Suppose, on the other hand, we visit a race that's far
ahead of us. We'd better not stay there long; think what
they might do to us. They might decide our ship was too
threatening and simply wipe us out. Or they might even
be so far advanced that we would mean nothing to them
at all—like ants or little squalling babies." Arcot laughed
at the thought.

"That isn't a very complimentary picture," objected Fuller.
"With the wonderful advances we've made, there just
isn't that much left to be able to say we're so little."

"Fuller, I'm surprised at you!" Arcot said. "Today, we
are only opening our eyes on the world of science. Our race
has only a few thousand years behind it and hundreds of
millions yet to come. How can any man of today, with his
freshly-opened eyes of science, take in the mighty pyramid
of knowledge that will be built up in those long, long years
of the future? It's too gigantic to grasp; we can't imagine
the things that the ever-expanding mind of man will discover."

Arcot's voice slowed, and a far-off look came in his eyes.

"You might say there can be no greater energy than that
of matter annihilation. I doubt that. I have seen hints of
something new—an energy so vast—so transcendently tremendous—that
it frightens me. The energies of all the
mighty suns of all the galaxies—of the whole cosmos—in
the hand of man! The energy of a billion billion billion suns!
And every sun pouring out its energy at the rate of quintillions
of horsepower every instant!

"But it's too great for man to have—I am going to forget
it, lest man be destroyed by his own might."

Arcot's halting speech told of his intense thought—of a
dream of such awful energies as man had never before conceived.
His eyes looked unseeing at the black velvet of
space with its few, scattered stars.

"But we're here to decide which way to go," he added
with a sudden briskness as he straightened his shoulders.
"Every now and then, I get a new idea and I—I sort of
dream. That's when I'm most likely to see the solution. I
think I know the solution now, but unless the need arises,
I'm never going to use it. It's too dangerous a toy."

There was silence for a moment, then Morey said, quietly:

"I've got a course plotted for us. We'll leave this Galaxy
at a steep angle—about forty-five degrees from the Galactic
plane—to give us a good view of our own Galaxy. And we
can head for one of the nebulae in that general area. What
do you say?"

"I say," remarked Fuller, "that some of the great void
without seems to have leaked into my own poor self. It's
been thirty thousand years since I am going to have a meal
this morning—whatever it is I mean—and I want another."
He looked meaningfully at Wade, the official cook of the
expedition.

Arcot suddenly burst out laughing. "So that's what I've
been wanting!" It had been ten chronometer hours since they
had eaten, but since they had been outracing light, they
were now thirty thousand years in Earth's past.

The weightlessness of free fall makes it difficult to recognize
normally familiar sensations, and the feeling of hunger
is one of them. There was little enough work to be done, so
there was no great need for nourishment, but the ordinary
sensation of hunger is not caused by lack of nourishment, but
an empty stomach.

Sleep was another problem. A restless body will not permit
a tired brain to sleep, and though they had done a
great deal of hard mental work, the lack of physical fatigue
made sleep difficult. The usual "day" in space was forty
hours, with thirty-hour waking periods and ten hours of
sleep.

"Let's eat, then," Arcot decided. "Afterwards, we'll take
a few photographs and then throw this ship into high and
really make time."

Two hours 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 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 thing that floated close behind them, unwavering,
shining with a faint light, a heatless illumination that
made everything in the darkened observatory glow very
faintly. It was the light of three hundred million suns seen
at a distance of three million million million miles! And it
seemed small because there was nothing with which to compare
it.

It was an amazingly beautiful thing, that tiny floating disc
of light.

Morey floated over to the cameras and began to take pictures.

"I'd like to take a color shot of that," he said a few minutes
later, "but that would require a direct shot through the
reflector telescope and a time exposure. And I can't do
that; the ship is moving."

"Not enough to make any difference," Arcot contradicted.
"We're moving away from it in a straight line, and that
thing is three quintillion miles away. We're not moving fast
enough to cause any measurable contraction in a time exposure.
As for having a steady platform, this ship weighs
a quarter of a million tons and is held by gyroscopes. We
won't shake it."

While Morey took the time exposure, Arcot looked at
the enlarged image in the telectroscope and tried to make
angular measurements from the individual stars. This he
found impossible. Although he could spot Betelgeuse and
Antares because of their tremendous radiation, they were
too close together for measurements; the angle subtended
was too small.

Finally, he decided to use the distance between Antares
and S Doradus in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, one of the
two clouds of stars which float as satellites to the Galaxy
itself.

To double-check, he used the radius of the Galaxy as
base to calculate the distance. The distances checked. The
ship was five hundred thousand light years from home!

After all the necessary observations were made, they swung
the ship on its axis and looked ahead for a landing place.

The nebulae ahead were still invisible to the naked eye
except as points, but the telectroscope finally revealed one as
decidedly nearer than the rest. It seemed to be a young
Island Universe, for there was still a vast cloud of gas and
dust from which stars were yet to be born in the central
whorl—a single titanic gas cloud that stretched out through
a million billion miles of space.

"Shall we head for that?" asked Arcot at last, as Morey
finished his observations.

"I think it would be as good as any—there are more stars
there than we can hope to visit."

"Well, then, here we go!"

Arcot dived for the control room, while Morey shut off
the telectroscope and put the latest photographs in the file.

Suddenly space was snapping about him—they were off
again. Another shock of surging energy—another—the ship
leaped forward at tremendous speed—still greater—then they
were rushing at top speed, and beside them ran the ghost
ships of the Ancient Mariner.

Morey pushed himself into the control room just as Arcot,
Wade, and Fuller were getting ready to start for the lab.

"We're off for quite a while, now," he said. "Our goal
is about five days away. I suggest we stop at the end of
four days, make more accurate measurements, then plan a
closer stop.

"I think from now on we ought to sleep in relays, so
that there will be three of us awake at all times. I'll turn
in now for ten hours, and then someone else can sleep. Okay?"

It was agreed, and in the meantime the three on duty
went down to the lab to work.

Arcot had finished the installation of the invisibility apparatus
in his suit at the end of ten hours, much to his disappointment.
He tested it, then cast about for something
to do while Wade and Morey added the finishing touches
to theirs.

Morey came down, and when Wade had finished his,
which took another quarter of an hour, he took the off duty
shift.

Arcot had gone to the library, and Morey was at work
down below. Fuller had come up, looking for something to
do, and had hit upon the excellent idea of fixing a meal.

He had just begun his preparations in the kitchen when
suddenly the Ancient Mariner gave a violent leap, and the
men, not expecting any weight, suddenly fell in different
ways with terrific force!

Fuller fell half the length of the galley and was knocked
out by the blow. Wade, asleep in bed, was awakened violently
by the shock, and Morey, who had been strapped in
his chair, was badly shaken.

Everyone cried out simultaneously—and Arcot was on his
way to the control room. The first shock was but a forerunner
of the storm. Suddenly the ship was hurled violently
about; the air was shot through with great burning sparks;
the snapping hiss of electricity was everywhere, and every
pointed metal object was throwing streamers of blue electric
flame into the air! The ship rocked, heaved, and cavorted
wildly, as though caught in the play of titanic forces!

Scrambling wildly along the hand-holds, Arcot made his
way towards the control room, which was now above, now
below, and now to one side of him as the wildly variable
acceleration shook the ship. Doggedly, he worked his way
up, frequently getting severe burns from the flaming sparks.

Below, in the power room, the relays were crashing in
and out wildly.

Then, suddenly, a new sound was added just as Arcot
pulled himself into the control chair and strapped himself
down. The radiation detector buzzed out its screaming warning!

"COSMIC RAYS!" Arcot yelled. "HIGH CONCENTRATION!"

He slapped at the switch which shot the heavy relux
screens across every window in the ship.

There was a sudden crash and a fuse went out below—a
fuse made of a silver bar two feet thick! In an instant,
the flames of the burning sparks flared up and died. The
ship cavorted madly, shaking mightily in the titanic, cosmic
forces that surrounded it—the forces that made the highest
energy form in the universe!

Arcot knew that nothing could be done with the power
coil. It was drained; the circuit was broken. He shifted in
the molecular drive, pushing the acceleration to four gravities,
as high as the men could stand.

And still the powerful ship was being tossed about, the
plaything of inconceivable forces. They lived only because
the forces did not try to turn the ship more violently, not
because of the strength of the ship, for nothing could resist
the awful power around them.

As a guide, Arcot used the compass gyroscope, the only
one not twisted far out of its original position; with it, he
managed to steer a fairly straight course.

Meanwhile, in the power room, Wade and Morey were
working frantically to get the space-strain drive coil recharged.
Despite the strength-sapping strain of working under
four gravities of acceleration, they managed to get the
auxiliary power unit into operation. In a few moments, they
had it pouring its energies into the coil-bank so that
they could charge up the central drive coil.

Another silver bar fuse was inserted, and Wade checked
the relays to make sure they were in working order.

Fuller, who had regained consciousness, worked his way
laboriously down to the power room carrying three space-suits.
He had stopped in the lab to get the power belts, and
the three men quickly donned them to help them overcome
the four-gravity pull.

Another half hour sped by as the bucking ship forced
its way through the terrific field in space.

Suddenly they felt a terrific jolt again—then the ship was
moving more smoothly, and gradually it was calm. They
were through!

"Have we got power for the space-strain drive yet?" Arcot
called through the intercom.

"Enough," Morey cried. "Try it!"

Arcot cut off the molecular motion drive, and threw in
all the space-control power he had. The ship was suddenly
supercharged with energy. It jarred suddenly—then was
quiet. He allowed ten minutes to pass, then he cut off
the drive and allowed the ship to go into free fall.

Morey's voice came over the intercom. "Arcot, things are
really busted up down here! We had to haywire half the
drive together."

"I'll be right down. Every instrument on the ship seems
to be out of kilter!"

It was a good thing they had plenty of spare parts;
some of the smaller relays had burned out completely,
and several of the power leads had fused under the load
that had been forced through them.

The space-strain drive had been leaking energy at a terrific
rate; without further repair, it could not function much
longer.

In the power room, Arcot surveyed the damage. "Well,
boys, we'd better get to work. We're stranded here until we
get that drive repaired!"

VIII

Forty hours later, Arcot was running the ship smoothly
at top speed once again. The four men had gone to bed
after more than thirty hours of hard work. That, coupled
with the exhaustion of working under four gravities, as they
had while the ship was going through the storm, was enough
to make them sleep soundly.

Arcot had awakened before the others and had turned
on the drive after resetting their course.

After that was done, there was little to do, and time
began to hang heavily on Arcot's hands. He decided to make
a thorough inspection of the hull when the others awoke.
The terrific strain might have opened cracks in the lux metal
hull that would not be detectable from the inside because
the inner wall was separated from the outer envelope.

Accordingly, he got out the spacesuits, making sure the
oxygen tanks were full and all was ready. Then he went
into the library, got out some books, and set about some
calculations he had in mind.

When Morey woke, some hours later, he found Arcot
still at work on his calculations.

"Hey!" he said, swinging himself into the chair beside
Arcot, "I thought you'd be on the lookout for more cosmic
rays!"

"Curious delusion, wasn't it?" asked Arcot blandly. "As
a matter of fact, I've been busy doing some figuring. I think
our chance of meeting another such region is about one
in a million million million million. Considering those chances,
I don't think we need to worry. I don't see how we ever
met one—but the chances of hitting one are better than
hitting two."

Just then Fuller stuck his head in the door.

"Oh," he said, "so you're at it already? Well, I wonder
if one of you could tell me just what it was we hit? I've
been so busy I haven't had a chance to think."

"Don't take the chance now, then," grinned Morey. "You
might strain your brain."

"Please!" Fuller pleaded, wincing. "Not before breakfast.
Just explain what that storm was."

"We simply came to a region in space where cosmic rays
are created," explained Arcot.

Fuller frowned. "But there's nothing out here to generate
cosmic rays!"

Arcot nodded. "True. I think I know their real source,
but I believe I'll merely say they are created here. I want
to do more work on this. My idea for an energy source
greater than any other in the universe has been confirmed.

"At any rate, they are created in that space, a perfect
vacuum, and the space there is distorted terrifically by the
titanic forces at work. It is bent and twisted far out of the
normal, even curvature, and it was that bumpy spot in space
that threw us about so.

"When we first entered, using the space-strain drive, the
space around the ship, distorted as it was, conflicted with
the region of the cosmic ray generation and the ship lost
out. The curvature of space that the ship caused was sometimes
reinforced and sometimes cancelled out by the twisted
space around it, and the tremendous surges of current back
and forth from the main power coil to the storage coils
caused the electric discharges that kept burning through the
air. I notice we all got a few burns from that. The field
was caused by the terrific surges of current, and that magnetic
field caused the walls of the ship to heat up due to
the generation of electric current in the walls."

Fuller looked around at the walls of the ship. "Well, the
Ancient Mariner sure took a beating."

"As a matter of fact, I was worried about that," said Arcot.
"Strong as that hull is, it might easily have been
strained in that field of terrific force. If it happened to
hit two 'space waves' at once, it might have given it an acceleration
in two different directions at once, which would
strain the walls with a force amounting to thousands of tons.
I laid out the suits up front, and I think we might reasonably
get out there and take a look at the old boat. When
Wade gets up—well, well—speak of the devil! My, doesn't
he look energetic?"

Wade's huge body was floating in through the library
door. He was yawning sleepily and rubbing his eyes. It
was evident he had not yet washed, and his growing beard,
which was heavy and black on his cheeks, testified to his
need for a shave. The others had shaved before coming
into the library.

"Wade," said Arcot, "we're going outside, and we have
to have someone in here to operate the airlock. Suppose you
get to work on the hirsute adornment; there's an atomic hydrogen
cutting torch down in the lab you can use, if you
wish. The rest of us are going outside." Then Arcot's voice
became serious. "By the way, don't try any little jokes like
starting off with a little acceleration. I don't think you would—you've
got good sense—but I like to make certain. If
you did, we'd be left behind, and you'd never find us in the
vast immensity of intergalactic space."

It wasn't a pleasant idea to contemplate. Each of the suits
had a radio for communication with each other and with the
ship, but they would only carry a few hundred miles. A
mere step in space!

Wade shook his head, grinning. "I have no desire to be
left all by myself on this ship, thank you. You don't
need to worry."

A few minutes later, Arcot, Morey, and Fuller stepped
out of the airlock and set to work, using power flashlights
to examine the outer hull for any signs of possible strain.

The flashlights, equipped as they were with storage coils
for power, were actually powerful searchlights, but in the
airlessness of space, the rays were absolutely invisible. They
could only be seen when they hit the relux inner wall at
such an angle that they were reflected directly into the observer's
eyes. The lux metal wall, being transparent, was
naturally invisible, and the smooth relux, reflecting one hundred
percent of the incident light, did not become illuminated,
for illumination is the result of the scattering of light.

It was necessary to look closely and pass the beams over
every square inch of the surface. However, a crack would
be rough, and hence would scatter light and be even more
readily visible than otherwise.

To their great relief, after an hour and a half of careful
inspection, none of them had found any signs of a crack,
and they went back into the ship to resume the voyage.

Again they hurled through space, the twin ghost ships
following them closely. Hour after hour the ship went on.
Now they had something else to do. They were at work calculating
some problems that Arcot had suggested in connection
with the velocities of motion that had been observed in
the stars at the edge of the island universe they were approaching.
Since these stars revolved about the mass of the
entire galaxy, it was possible to calculate the mass of the
entire universe by averaging the values from several stars.
Their results were not exact, but they were reliable enough.
They found the universe to have a mass of two hundred
and fifty million suns, only a little less than the home Galaxy.
It was an average-sized nebula.

Still the hours dragged as they came gradually nearer
their goal—gradually, despite their speed of twenty-four
light years per second!

At the end of the second day after their trouble with
the cosmic ray field, they stopped for observation. They
were now so near the Island Universe that the stars spread
out in a huge disc ahead of them.

"About three hundred thousand light years distant, I
should guess," said Morey.

"We know our velocity fairly accurately," said Wade. "Why
can't we calculate the distance between two of these stars
and then go on in?"

"Good idea," agreed Arcot. "Take the angle, will you,
Morey? I'll swing the ship."

After taking their measurements, they advanced for one
hour. Knowing this distance from experience, they were able
to calculate the diameter of this galaxy. It turned out to be
on the order of ninety thousand light years.

They were now much closer; they seemed, indeed, on the
very edge of the giant universe. The thousands of stars
flamed bright below them, stretching across their horizon
more and more—a galaxy the eyes of men had never before
seen at such close range! This galaxy had not yet
condensed entirely to stars, and in its heart there still remained
the vast gas cloud that would eventually be stars
and planets. The vast misty cloud was plainly visible, glowing
with a milky light like some vast frosted light bulb.

It was impossible to conceive the size of the thing; it
looked only like some model, for they were still over a quarter
of a million light years from it.

Morey looked up from his calculations. "I think we
should be there in about three hours. Suppose we go at
full speed for about two hours and then change to low
speed?"

"You're the astronomical boss, Morey," said Arcot. "Let's
go!"

They swung the ship about once more and started again.
As they drew nearer to this new universe, they began to
feel more interest in the trip. Things were beginning to
happen!

The ship plunged ahead at full speed for two hours.
They could see nothing at that velocity except the two
ghost ships that were their ever-present companions. Then
they stopped once more.

About them, they saw great suns shining. One was so
close they could see it as a disc with the naked eye. But
they could not see clearly; the entire sky was misty and the
stars that were not close were blotted out. The room seemed
to grow warm.

"Hey! Your calculations were off!" called Arcot. "We're
getting out of here!"

Suddenly the air snapped and they were traveling at
low speed under the drive of the space-strain apparatus.
The entire space about them was lit with a dim violet glow.
In ten minutes, the glow was gone and Arcot cut the drive.

They were out in ordinary dark space, with its star-studded
blackness.

"What was the matter with my calculations?" Morey wanted
to know.

"Oh, nothing much," Arcot said casually. "You were only
about thirty thousand light years off. We landed right in
the middle of the central gas cloud, and we were plowing
through it at a relative velocity of around sixteen thousand
miles per second! No wonder we got hot!

"We're lucky we didn't come near any stars in the process;
if we had, we could have had to recharge the coil."

"It's a wonder we didn't burn up at that velocity," said
Fuller.

"The gas wasn't dense enough," Arcot explained. "That
gas is a better vacuum than the best pump could give you
on Earth; there are fewer molecules per cubic inch than
there are in a radio tube.

"But now that we're out of that, let's see if we can
find a planet. No need to take photographs going in; if
we want to find the star again, we can take photos as we
leave. If we don't want to find it, we would just waste
film.

"I'll leave it to Morey to find the star we want."

Morey set to work at once with the telescope; trying to
find the nearest star of spectral type G-0, as had been agreed
upon. He also wanted to find one of the same magnitude,
or brilliance. At last, after investigating several such suns,
he discovered one which seemed to fulfill all his wishes. The
ship was turned, and they started toward the adventure they
had really hoped to find.

As they rushed through space, the distorted stars shining
vividly before them, they saw the one which was their
goal. A bright, slowly changing violet point on the cross-hairs
of the aiming telescope.

"How far is it?" asked Arcot.

"About thirty light centuries," replied Morey, watching
the star eagerly.

They drove on in silence. Then, suddenly, Morey cried
out: "Look! It's gone!"

"What happened?" asked Arcot in surprise.

Morey rubbed his chin in thought. "The star suddenly
flared brightly for an instant, then disappeared. Evidently,
it was a G-0 giant which had burned up most of the hydrogen
that stars normally use for fuel. When that happens,
a star begins to collapse, increasing in brilliance due to the
heat generated by the gas falling toward the center of the
star.

"Then other nuclear reactions begin to take place, and,
due to the increased transparency of the star, a supernova
is produced. The star blows away most of its gaseous envelope,
leaving only the superdense core. In other words, it leaves
a white dwarf." He paused and looked at Arcot. "I wonder
if that star did have any planets?"

They all knew what he meant. What was the probable
fate of beings whose sun had suddenly collapsed to a tiny,
relatively cold point in the sky?

Suddenly, there loomed before them the dim bulk of the
star, a disc already, and Arcot snapped the ship over to the
molecular motion drive at once. He knew they must be close.
Before them was the angry disc of the flaming white star.

Arcot swung the ship a bit to one side, running in close
to the flaming star. It was not exceedingly hot, despite the
high temperature and intense radiation, for the radiating
surface was too small.

They swung about the star in a parabolic orbit, for, at
their velocity, the sun could not hold them in a planetary
orbit.

"Our velocity, relative to this star, is pretty high," Arcot
announced. "I'm swinging in close so that I can use the
star's attraction as a brake. At this distance, it will be about
six gravities, and we can add to that a molecular drive braking
of four gravities.

"Suppose you look around and see if there are any planets.
We can break free and head for another star if there aren't."

Even at ten gravities of deceleration, it took several hours
to reduce their speed to a point which would make it possible
to head for any planet of the tiny sun.

Morey went to the observatory and swept the sky with
the telectroscope.

It was difficult to find planets because the reflected light
from the weak star was so dim, but he finally found one.
He took angular readings on it and on the central sun. A
little later, he took more readings. Because of the changing
velocity of the ship, the readings were not too accurate,
but his calculations showed it to be several hundred million
miles out.

They were decelerating rapidly, and soon their momentum
had been reduced to less than four miles a second.
When they reached the planet, Arcot threw the ship into
an orbit around it and began to spiral down.

Through the clear lux windows of the control room, the
men looked down upon a bleak, frozen world.

IX

Below the ship lay the unfamiliar panorama of an unknown
world that circled, frozen, around a dim, unknown
sun, far out in space. Cold and bleak, the low, rolling hills
below were black, bare rock, coated in spots with a white
sheen of what appeared to be snow, though each of the
men realized it must be frozen air. Here and there ran
strange rivers of deep blue which poured into great lakes
and seas of blue liquid. There were mighty mountains of
deep blue crystal looming high, and in the hollows and
cracks of these crystal mountains lay silent, motionless seas
of deep blue, unruffled by any breeze in this airless world.
It was a world that lay frozen under a dim, dead sun.

They continued over the broad sweep of the level, crystalline
plain as the bleak rock disappeared behind them. This
world was about ten thousand miles in diameter, and its
surface gravity about a quarter greater than that of Earth.

On and on they swept, swinging over the planet at an
altitude of less than a thousand feet, viewing the unutterably
desolate scene of the cold, dead world.

Then, ahead of them loomed a bleak, dark mass of rock
again. They had crossed the frozen ocean and were coming
to land again—a land no more solid than the sea.

Everywhere lay the deep drifts of snow, and here and
there, through valleys, ran the streams of bright blue.

"Look!" cried Morey in sudden surprise. Far ahead and
to their left loomed a strange formation of jutting vertical
columns, covered with the white burden of snow. Arcot
turned a powerful searchlight on it, and it stood out brightly
against the vast snowfield. It was a dead, frozen city.

As they looked at it, Arcot turned the ship and headed
for it without a word.

It was hard to realize the enormity of the catastrophe
that had brought a cold, bleak death to the population of
this world—death to an intelligent race.

Arcot finally spoke. "I'll land the ship. I think it will
be safe for us all to leave. Get out the suits and make sure
all the tanks are charged and the heaters working. It will
be colder here than in space. Out there, we were only cooled
by radiation, but those streams are probably liquid nitrogen,
oxygen, and argon, and there's a slight atmosphere of
hydrogen, helium and neon cooled to about fifty degrees
Absolute. We'll be cooled by conduction and convection."

As the others got the suits ready, he lowered the ship
gently to the snowy ground. It sank into nearly ten feet of
snow. He turned on the powerful searchlight, and swept it
around the ship. Under the warm beams, the frozen gasses
evaporated, and in a few moments he had cleared the area
around the ship.

Morey and the others came back with their suits. Arcot
donned his, and adjusted his weight to ten pounds with the
molecular power unit.

A short time later, they stepped out of the airlock onto
the ice field of the frozen world. High above them glowed
the dim, blue-white disc of the tiny sun, looking like little
more than a bright star.

Adjusting the controls on the suits, the four men lifted
into the tenuous air and headed toward the city, moving
easily about ten feet above the frozen wastes of the snow
field.

"The thing I don't understand," Morey said as they shot
toward the city, "is why this planet is here at all. The intense
radiation from the sun when it went supernova should have
vaporized it!"

Arcot pointed toward a tall, oddly-shaped antenna that
rose from the highest building of the city. "There's your
answer. That antenna is similar to those we found on the
planets of the Black Star; it's a heat screen. They probably
had such antennas all over the planet.

"Unfortunately, the screen's efficiency goes up as the
fourth power of the temperature. It could keep out the terrific
heat of a supernova, but couldn't keep in the heat of
the planet after the supernova had died. The planet was
too cool to make the screen work efficiently!"

At last they came to the outskirts of the dead city. The
vertical walls of the buildings were free of snow, and they
could see the blank, staring eyes of the windows, and within,
the bleak, empty rooms. They swept on through the
frozen streets until they came to one huge building in the
center. The doors of bronze had been closed, and through
the windows they could see that the room had been piled
high with some sort of insulating material, evidently used
as a last-ditch attempt to keep out the freezing cold.

"Shall we break in?" asked Arcot.

"We may as well," Morey's voice answered over the radio.
"There may be some records we could take back to
Earth and have deciphered. In a time like this, I imagine
they would leave some records, hoping that some race might
come and find them."

They worked with molecular ray pistols for fifteen minutes
tearing a way through. It was slow work because they
had to use the heat ray pistols to supply the necessary
energy for the molecular motion.

When they finally broke through, they found they had
entered on the second floor; the deep snow had buried
the first. Before them stretched a long, richly decorated hall,
painted with great colored murals.

The paintings displayed a people dressed in a suit of
some soft, white cloth, with blond hair that reached to their
shoulders. They were shorter and more heavily built than
Earthmen, perhaps, but there was a grace to them that denied
the greater gravity of their planet. The murals portrayed a
world of warm sunlight, green plants, and tall trees waving
in a breeze—a breeze of air that now lay frozen on the
stone floors of their buildings.

Scene after scene they saw—then they came to a great
hall. Here they saw hundreds of bodies; people wrapped in
heavy cloth blankets. And over the floor of the room lay
little crystals of green.

Wade looked at the little crystals for a long time, and
then at the people who lay there, perfectly preserved by the
utter cold. They seemed only sleeping—men, women, and
children, sleeping under a blanket of soft snow that evaporated
and disappeared as the energy of the lights fell on it.
There was one little group the men looked at before they
left the room of death. There were three in it—a young
man, a fair, blonde young woman who seemed scarcely
more than a girl, and between them, a little child. They
were sleeping, arms about each other, warm in the arms of
Death, the kindly Reliever of Pain.

Arcot turned and rose, flying swiftly down the long corridor
toward the door.

"That was not meant for us," he said. "Let's leave."

The others followed.

"But let's see what records they left," he went on. "It
may be that they wanted us to know their tragic story. Let's
see what sort of civilization they had."

"Their chemistry was good, at least," said Wade. "Did
you notice those green crystals? A quick, painless poison gas
to relieve them of the struggle against the cold."

They went down to the first floor level, where there was
a single great court. There were no pillars, only a vast,
smooth floor.

"They had good architecture," said Morey. "No pillars under
all the vast load of that building."

"And the load is even greater under this gravity," remarked
Arcot.

In the center of the room was a great, golden bronze
globe resting on a platform of marble. It must have been
new when this world froze, for there was no sign of corrosion
or oxidation. The men flew over to it and stood beside
it, looking at the great sphere, nearly fifteen feet in diameter.

"A globe of their world," said Fuller, looking at it with
interest.

"Yes," agreed Arcot, "and it was set up after they were
sure the cold would come, from the looks of it. Let's take
a look at it." He flew up to the top of it and viewed it
from above. The whole globe was a carefully chiseled relief
map, showing seas, mountains, and continents.

"Arcot—come here a minute," called Morey. Arcot dropped
down to where Morey was looking at the globe. On the
edge of one of the continents was a small raised globe,
and around the globe, a circle had been etched.

"I think this is meant to represent this globe," Morey said.
"I'm almost certain it represents this very spot. Now look
over here." He pointed to a spot which, according to the
scale of the globe, was about five thousand miles away. Projecting
from the surface of the bronze globe was a little
silver tower.

"They want us to go there," continued Morey. "This was
erected only shortly before the catastrophe; they must have
put relics there that they want us to get. They must have
guessed that eventually intelligent beings would cross space;
I imagine they have other maps like this in every large
city.

"I think it's our duty to visit that cairn."

"I quite agree," assented Arcot. "The chance of other men
visiting this world is infinitely small."

"Then let's leave this City of the Dead!" said Wade.

It gave them a sense of depression greater than that inspired
by the vast loneliness of space. One is never so lonely
as when he is with the dead, and the men began to realize
that the original Ancient Mariner had been more lonely
with strange companions than they had been in the depths
of ten million light years of space.

They went back to the ship, floating through the last
remnants of this world's atmosphere, back through the chill
of the frozen gases to the cheering, warm interior of the
ship.

It was a contrast that made each of them appreciate more
fully the gift that a hot, blazing sun really is. Perhaps that
was what made Fuller ask: "If this happened to a star so
much like our sun, why couldn't it happen to Sol?"

"Perhaps it may," said Morey softly. "But the eternal optimism
of man keeps us saying: 'It can't happen here.' And
besides—" He put a hand on the wall of the ship, "—we
don't ever have to worry about anything like that now. Not
with ships like this to take us to a new sun—a new planet."

Arcot lifted the ship and flew over the cold, frozen
ground beneath them, following the route indicated on the
great globe in the dead city. Mile after mile of frozen ice
fields flew by as they shot over it at three miles per second.

Suddenly, the bleak bulk of a huge mountain loomed
gigantic before them. Arcot reversed the power and brought
the ship to a stop. With the powerful searchlight, he swept
the area, looking for the tower he knew should be here. At
last, he made it out, a pyramid rather than a tower, and
coated over with ice. They soon thawed out the frozen
gasses by playing the energy of three powerful searchlights
upon them, and in a few minutes the glint of gold showed
through the melting ice and show.

"It looks," said Wade, "as though they have an outer
wall of gold over a strong wall of iron or steel to protect it
from corrosion. Certainly gold doesn't have enough tensile
strength to hold itself up under this gravity—not in such
masses as that."

Arcot brought the ship down beside the tower and the
men once more went out through the airlock into the cold
of the almost airless world. They flew across to the pyramid
and looked for some means of entrance. In several places,
they noticed hieroglyphics carved in great, foot-high characters.
They searched in vain for a door until they noticed
that the pyramid was not perfect, but truncated, leaving a
flat area on top. The only joint in the walls seemed to be
there, but there was no handle or visible methods of opening
the door.

Arcot turned his powerful light on the surface and
searched carefully for some opening device. He found a
bas-relief engraving of a hand pointing to a corner of the
door. He looked more closely and found a small jewel-like
lens set in the metal.

Suddenly the men felt a vibration! There was a heavy
click, and the door panel began to drop slowly.

"Get on it!" Arcot cried. "We can always break our way
out if we're trapped!"

The four men leaped on it and sank slowly with it. The
massive walls of the tower were nearly five feet thick, and
made of some tough, white metal.

"Pure iron!" diagnosed Wade. "Or perhaps a silicon-iron
alloy. Not as strong as steel, but very resistant to corrosion."

When the elevator stopped, they found themselves in a
great chamber that was obviously a museum of the lost
race. All around the walls were arranged models, books, and
diagrams.

"We can never hope to take all this in our ship!" said
Arcot, looking at the great collection. "Look—there's an old
winged airplane! And a steam engine—and that's an electric
motor! And that thing looks like some kind of an electric
battery."

"But we can't take all that stuff," objected Fuller.

"No," Morey agreed. "I think our best bet would be to
take all the books we can—making sure we get the introductory
ones, so we can read the language.

"See—over there—they have marked those shelves with a
single vertical mark. The ones next to them have two vertical
marks, and next ones three. I suggest we load up with
those books and take them to the ship."

The rest agreed, and they began carrying armloads of
books, flying out through the top of the pyramid to the
ship and back for more.

Instead of flying back to the pyramid for the last load,
Arcot announced that he was going to leave a note for
anyone who might come here later. While the others went
back for the last load, he worked at drawing the "note".

"Let's see your masterpiece," said Morey as the three men
returned to the ship with the last of the books.

Arcot had used a piece of tough, heavy plastic which
would resist any corrosion the cold, almost airless world
might have to offer.

Near the top, he had drawn a representation of their
ship, and beneath it a representation of the route they had
taken from universe to universe. The galaxy they were in
was represented by a cloud of gas, its main identifying feature.
Underneath the dotted line of their route through space,
he had printed "200,000,000,000, u".

Then followed a little table. The numeral "1" followed by
a straight bar, then "2" followed by two bars, and so on up
to ten. Ten was represented by ten bars and, in addition,
an S-shaped sign. Twenty was next, followed by twenty
bars and two S-shaped signs. Thus he had worked up to
"100".

The system he used would make it clear to any reasoning
creature that he had used a decimal system and that the
zeroes meant ten times.

Next below, he had drawn the planetary system of the
frozen world, and the distance from the planet they were
on to the central sun he labeled "u". Thus, the finders could
reason that they had come a distance of two hundred billion
units, where a distance of three hundred million miles was
taken as the unit; they had, then, come from another
galaxy. Certainly any creature with enough intelligence to
reach this frozen world would understand this!

"Since the year of this planet is approximately eight
times our own," Arcot continued, "I am indicating that we
came here approximately five hundred years after the catastrophe."
He pointed at several of the other drawings.

They left the message in the tower, and Arcot closed
the door, leaving the pyramid exactly as it had been before
they had come.

"Say!" Morey commented, "how did you open and close
that door, anyway?"

Arcot grinned. "Didn't you notice the jewel at the corner?
It was the lens of a photoelectric cell. My flashlight
opened the door. I didn't figure it out; it just worked accidentally."

Morey raised an eyebrow. "But if the darned thing is so
simple, any creature, intelligent or not, might be able to get
in and destroy the records!"

Arcot looked at him. "And where are your savages going
to come from? There are none on this planet, and anyone
intelligent enough to build a spaceship isn't going to destroy
the contents of the tower."

"Oh." Morey looked a little sheepish.

They went into the airlock and took off their suits. Then
they began packing the precious books in specimen cases
that had been brought for the purpose of preserving such
things.

When the last of them was carefully stowed, they returned
to the control room. They looked silently out across
this strange, dead world, thinking how much it must have
been like Earth. It was dead now, and frozen forever. The
low hills that stretched out beneath them were dimly lighted
by the weak rays of a shrunken sun. Three hundred million
miles away, it glowed so weakly that this world received
only a little more heat than it might have received from a
small coal fire a mile away.

So weakly it flared that in this thin atmosphere of hydrogen
and helium, its little corona glowed about it plainly,
and even the stars around it shone brilliantly. The men could
see one constellation that grouped itself in the outlines of
a dragon, with the sun of this system as its cold, baleful
eye.

Gradually, Arcot lifted the ship, and, as they headed out
into space, they could see the dim frozen plains fall behind.
It was as if a load of oppressing loneliness parted from them
as they flew out into the vast spaces of the eternal stars.

X

Arcot looked speculatively at the star field in the great
broad window before him. "We'll want to find another G-0
sun, naturally, but I don't think we ought to go directly
from here. If we did, we'd have to do a lot of backtracking
to get back to this dead star. I suggest we go back
to the edge of this galaxy, taking pictures on the way out,
so that any future investigators can come in directly. It'll
only take a few hours."

"I think you're right," agreed Morey. "Besides, that will
give us a wider choice of stars to pick our next G-0 from.
Let's get going."

Arcot moved the red switch, and the ship shot away at
half speed. They watched the green image of the white
dwarf fade and then suddenly flare up and become bright
again as they outraced the light that had left it five centuries
before.

They stopped and took more photographs so that the
path could be marked. They stopped every light century
until they reached a point where the star was merely a dim
point, almost lost in the myriad of stars around it.

Then out to the edge of the galaxy they went, out toward
their own universe.

"Arcot," Morey called, "let's go out, say one million
light years into space, at an angle to this galaxy, and see
if we can get both galaxies on one plate. It will make
navigation between them easier."

"Good idea. We can get out and back in one day—and
this 'time' won't count back on Earth, anyway." Since they
would travel in the space-strain all the time, it would not
count as Earth time.

Arcot pushed the red control all the way forward, and
the ship began to move at its top velocity of twenty-four
light years per second. The hours dragged heavily, as they
had when they were coming in, and Arcot remained alone
on watch while the others went to their rooms for some
sleep, strapping their weightless bodies securely in the bunks.

It was hours later when Morey awoke with a sudden premonition
of trouble. He looked at the chronometer on the
wall—he had slept twelve hours! They had gone beyond the
million light year mark! It didn't matter, except it showed
that something had happened to Arcot.

Something had. Arcot was sound asleep in the middle of
the library—exactly in the middle, floating in the room ten
feet from each wall.

Morey called out to him, and Arcot awoke with a guilty
start. "A fine sentry you make," said Morey caustically.
"Can't even keep awake when all you have to do is sit
here and see that we don't run into anything. We've gone
more than our million light years already, and we're still
going strong. Come on—snap out of it!"

"I'm sorry—I apologize—I know I shouldn't have slept,
but it was so perfectly quiet here except for your deep-toned,
musical snores that I couldn't help it," grinned Arcot. "Get
me down from here and we'll stop."

"Get you down, nothing!" Morey snapped. "You stay
right there while I call the others and we decide what's
to be done with a sleeping sentry."

Morey turned and left to wake the others.

He had awakened Wade and told him what had happened,
and they were on their way to wake up Fuller,
when suddenly the air of the ship crackled around them!
The space was changing! They were coming out of hyperspace!

In amazement, Morey and Wade looked at each other.
They knew that Arcot was still floating helplessly in the middle
of the room, but—

"Hold on, you brainless apes! We're turning around!"
came Arcot's voice, full of suppressed mirth.

Suddenly they were both plastered against the wall of
the ship under four gravities of acceleration! Unable to
walk, they could only crawl laboriously toward the control
room, calling to Arcot to shut off the power.

When Morey had left him stranded in the library, Arcot
had decided it was high time he got to the floor. Quickly,
he looked around for a means of doing so. Near him, floating
in the air, was the book he had been reading, but it
was out of reach. He had taken off his boots when he started
to read, so the Fuller rocket method was out. It seemed
hopeless.

Then, suddenly, came the inspiration! Quickly, he slipped
off his shirt and began waving it violently in the air.
He developed a velocity of about two inches a second—not
very fast, but fast enough. By the time he had put his
shirt back on, he had reached the wall.

After that, it was easy to shoot himself over to the door,
out into the corridor and into the control room without being
seen by Morey, who was in Wade's room.

Just as Wade and Morey reached the doorway to the
control room, Arcot decided it was time to shut the power
off. Both of the men, laboring under more than eight hundred
pounds of weight, were suddenly weightless. All the
strength of their powerful muscles were expended in hurling
them against the far wall.

The complaints were loud, but they finally simmered down
to an earnest demand to know how in the devil Arcot had
managed to get off dead center.

"Why, that was easy," he said airily. "I just turned on a
little power; I fell under the influence of the weight and
then it was easy to get to the control room."

"Come on," Wade demanded. "The truth! How did you
get here?"

"Why, I just pushed myself here."

"Yes; no doubt. But how did you get hold of anything
to push?"

"I just took a handful of air and threw it away and reached
the wall."

"Oh, of course—and how did you hold the air?"

"I just took some air and threw it away and reached
the wall."

Which was all they could learn. Arcot was going to keep
his system secret, it seemed.

"At any rate," Arcot continued, "I am back in the control
room, where I belong, and you are not in the observatory
where you belong. Now get out of my territory!"

Morey pushed himself back to the observatory, and after
a few minutes, his voice came over the intercom. "Let's
move on a bit more, Arcot. We still can't get both galaxies
on the same plate. Let's go on for another hour and take
our pictures from that point."

Fuller had awakened and come in in the meantime, and
he wanted to know why they didn't take some pictures from
this spot.

"No point in it," said Morey. "We have the ones we took
coming in; what we want is a wide-angle shot."

Arcot threw on the space-strain drive once more, and they
headed on at top speed.

They were all in the control room, watching the instruments
and joking—principally the latter—when it happened.
One instant they were moving smoothly, weightlessly along.
The next instant, the ship rocked as though it had been
struck violently! The air was a snapping inferno of shooting
sparks, and there came the sharp crash of the suddenly
volatilized silver bar that was their main power fuse. Simultaneously,
they were hurled forward with terrific force; the
straps that held them in place creaked with the sudden
strain, and the men felt weak and faint.

Consciousness nearly left them; they had been burned in
a dozen places by the leaping sparks.

Then it was over. Except that the ghost ships no longer
followed them, the Ancient Mariner seemed unchanged.
Around them, they could see the dim glowing of the galaxies.

"Brother! We came near something!" Arcot cried. "It may
be a wandering star! Take a look around, quick!"

But the dark of space seemed utterly empty around them
as they coasted weightless through space. Then Arcot snapped
off the lights of the control room, and in a moment his
eyes had become accustomed to the dim lights.

It was dead ahead of them. It was a dull red glow, so
dim it was scarcely visible. Arcot realized it was a dead
star.

"There it is, Morey!" he said. "A dead star, directly
ahead of us! Good God, how close are we?"

They were falling straight toward the dim red bulk.

"How far are we from it?" Fuller asked.

"At least several million—" Morey began. Then he looked
at the distance recorded on the meteor detector. "ARCOT!
FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE DO SOMETHING! THAT THING
IS ONLY A FEW HUNDRED MILES AWAY!"

"There's only one thing to do," Arcot said tightly. "We
can never hope to avoid that thing; we haven't got the power.
I'm going to try for an orbit around it. We'll fall toward
it and give the ship all the acceleration she'll take. There's
no time to calculate—I'll just pile on the speed until we
don't fall into it."

The others, strapped into the control chairs, prepared
themselves for the acceleration to come.

If the Ancient Mariner had dropped toward the star
from an infinite distance, Arcot could have applied enough
power to put the ship in a hyperbolic orbit which would
have carried them past the star. But they had come in on
the space drive, and had gotten fairly close before the gravitational
field had drained the power from the main coil, and
it was not until the space field had broken that they had
started to accelerate toward the star. Their velocity would
not be great enough to form an escape orbit.

Even now, they would fall far short of enough velocity
to get into an elliptical orbit unless they used the molecular
drive.

Arcot headed toward one edge of the star, and poured
power into the molecular drive. The ship shot forward under
an additional five and a half gravities of acceleration. Their
velocity had been five thousand miles per second when they
entered hyperspace, and they were swiftly adding to their
original velocity.

They did not, of course, feel the pull of the sun, since
they were in free fall in its field; they could only feel the
five and a half gravities of the molecular drive. Had they
been able to experience the pull of the star, they would have
been crushed by their own weight.

Their speed was mounting as they drew nearer to the
star, and Arcot was forcing the ship on with all the additional
power he could get. But he knew that the only hope
they had was to get the ship in a closed ellipse around the
star, and a closed ellipse meant that they would be forever
bound to the star as a planet! Helpless, for not even the
titanic power of the Ancient Mariner could enable them
to escape!

As the dull red of the dead sun ballooned toward them,
Arcot said: "I think we'll make an orbit, all right, but we're
going to be awfully close to the surface of that thing!"

The others were quiet; they merely watched Arcot and the
star as Arcot made swift movements with the controls, doing
all he could to establish them in an orbit that would be
fairly safe.

It seemed like an eternity—five and a half gravities of
acceleration held the men in their chairs almost as well as
the straps of the antiacceleration units that bound them.
When a man weighs better than half a ton, he doesn't
feel like moving much.

Fuller whispered to Morey out of the corner of his sagging
mouth. "What on Earth—I mean, what in Space is that
thing? We're within only a few hundred miles, you said, so
it must be pretty small. How could it pull us around like
this?"

"It's a dead white dwarf—a 'black dwarf', you might
say," Morey replied. "As the density of such matter increases,
the volume of the star depends less and less on its temperature.
In a dwarf with the mass of the sun, the temperature
effect is negligible; it's the action of the forces within the
electron-nucleon gas which makes up the star that reigns
supreme.

"It's been shown that if a white dwarf—or a black one—is
increased in mass, it begins to decrease sharply in volume
after a certain point is reached. In fact, no cold star can exist
with a volume greater than about one and a half times
the mass of the sun—as the mass increases and the pressure
goes up, the star shrinks in volume because of the degenerate
matter in it. At a little better than 1.4 times the mass
of the sun—our sun, I mean: Old Sol—the star would theoretically
collapse to a point.

"That has almost happened in this case. The actual limit
is when the star has reached the density of a neutron, and
this star hasn't collapsed that far by a long shot.

"But that star is only forty kilometers—or less than twenty-five
miles in diameter!"

It took nearly two hours of careful juggling to get an
orbit which Arcot considered reasonably circular.

And when they finally did, Wade looked at the sky above
them and shouted: "Say, look! What are all those streaks?"

Arcing up from the surface of the dull red plain below
them and going over the ship, were several dim streaks of
light across the sky. One of them was brighter than the
rest, a bright white streak. The streaks didn't move; they
seemed to have been painted on the sky overhead, glowing
bands of unwavering light.

"Those," said Arcot, "are the nebulae. That wide streak
is the one we just left. The bright streak must be a nearby
star.

"They look like streaks because we're moving so fast in
so small an orbit." He pointed to the red star beneath them.
"We're less than twenty miles from the center of that thing!
We're almost exactly thirty kilometers from its center, or
about ten kilometers from its surface! But, because of it's
great mass, our orbital velocity is something terrific!

"We're going around that thing better than three hundred
times every second; our 'year' is three milliseconds long!
Our orbital velocity is seven hundred thousand kilometers
per second!

"We're moving along at about a fifth of the speed of
light!"

"Are we safe in this orbit?" Fuller asked.

"Safe enough," said Arcot bitterly. "So damned safe that
I don't see how we'll ever break free. We can't pull away
with all the power on this ship. We're trapped!

"Well, I'm worn out from working under all that gravity;
let's eat and get some sleep."

"I don't feel like sleeping," said Fuller. "You may call
this safe, but it would only take an instant to fall down to the
surface of that thing there." He looked down at their inert,
but titanically powerful enemy whose baleful glow seemed
even now to be burning their funeral pyre.

"Well," said Arcot, "falling into it and flying off into space
are two things you don't have to worry about. If we started
toward it, we'd be falling, and our velocity would increase;
as a result, we'd bounce right back out again. The
magnitude of the force required to make us fall into that
sun is appalling! The gravitational pull on us now amounts
to about five billion tons, which is equalized by the centrifugal
force of our orbital velocity. Any tendency to change it
would be like trying to bend a spring with that much resistance.

"We'd require a tremendous force to make us either fall
into that star—or get away from it.

"To escape, we have to lift this ship out against gravity.
That means we'd have to lift about five million tons of mass.
As we get farther out, our weight will decrease as the gravitational
attraction drops off, but we would need such vast
amounts of energy that they are beyond human conception.

"We have burned up two tons of matter recharging the
coils, and are now using another two tons to recharge them
again. We need at least four tons to spare, and we only
started out with twenty. We simply haven't got fuel enough
to break loose from this star's gravitational hold, vast as the
energy of matter is. Let's eat, and then we can sleep on the
problem."

Wade cooked a meal for them, and they ate in silence,
trying to think of some way out of their dilemma. Then
they tried to sleep on the problem, as Arcot had suggested,
but it was difficult to relax. They were physically tired; they
had gone through such great strains, even in the short time
that they had been maneuvering, that they were very tired.

Under a pull five times greater than normal gravity, they
had tired in one-fifth the time they would have at one gravity,
but their brains were still wide awake, trying to think
of some way—any way—to get away from the dark sun.

But at last sleep came.

XI

Morey thought he was the first to waken when, seven hours
later, he dressed and dove lightly, noiselessly, out into the
library. Suddenly, he noticed that the telectroscope was in
operation—he heard the low hum of its smoothly working
director motors.

He turned and headed back toward the observatory. Arcot
was busy with the telectroscope.

"What's up, Arcot?" he demanded.

Arcot looked up at him and dusted off his hands. "I've
just been gimmicking up the telectroscope. We're going around
this dead dwarf once every three milliseconds, which
makes it awfully hard to see the stars around us. So I put
in a cutoff which will shut the telectroscope off most of the
time; it only looks at the sky once every three milliseconds.
As a result, we can get a picture of what's going on around
us very easily. It won't be a steady picture, but since we're
getting a still picture three hundred times a second, it will
be better than any moving picture film ever projected as
far as accuracy is concerned.

"I did it because I want to take a look at that bright
streak in the sky. I think it'll be the means to our salvation—if
there is any."

Morey nodded. "I see what you mean; if that's another
white dwarf—which it most likely is—we can use it to escape.
I think I see what you're driving at."

"If it doesn't work," Arcot said coolly, "we can profit by
the example of the people we left back there. Suicide is
preferable to dying of cold."

Morey nodded. "The question is: How helpless are we?"

"Depends entirely on that star; let's see if we can get
a focus on it."

At the orbital velocity of the ship, focussing on the star
was indeed a difficult thing to do. It took them well over an
hour to get the image centered in the screen without its
drifting off toward one edge; it took even longer to get the
focus close enough to a sphere to give them a definite
reading on the instruments. The image had started out as a
streak, but by taking smaller and smaller sections of the
streak at the proper times, they managed to get a good,
solid image. But to get it bright enough was another problem;
they were only picking up a fraction of the light, and
it had to be amplified greatly to make a visible image.

When they finally got what they were looking for, Morey
gazed steadily at the image. "Now the job is to figure the
distance. And we haven't got much parallax to work with."

"If we compute in the timing in our blinker system at opposite
sides of the orbit, I think we can do it," Arcot said.

They went to work on the problem. When Fuller and
Wade showed up, they were given work to do—Morey gave
them equations to solve without telling them to what the
figures applied.

Finally Arcot said: "Their period about the common
center of gravity is thirty-nine hours, as I figure it."

Morey nodded. "Check. And that gives us a distance of
two million miles apart."

"Just what are you two up to?" asked Fuller. "What
good is another star? The one we're interested in is this
freak underneath us."

"No," Arcot corrected, "we're interested in getting away
from the one beneath us, which is an entirely different
matter. If we were midway between this star and that one,
the gravitational effects of the two would be cancelled out,
since we would be pulled as hard in one direction as the
other. Then we'd be free of both pulls and could escape!

"If we could get into that neutral area long enough to
turn on our space strain drive, we could get away between
them fast. Of course, a lot of our energy would be eaten
up, but we'd get away.

"That's our only hope," Arcot concluded.

"Yes, and what a whale of a hope it is," Wade snorted
sarcastically. "How are you going to get out to a point
halfway between these two stars when you don't have enough
power to lift this ship a few miles?"

"If Mahomet can not go to the mountain," misquoted
Arcot, "then the mountain must come to Mahomet."

"What are you going to do?" Wade asked in exasperation.
"Beat Joshua? He made the sun stand still, but this
is a job of throwing them around!"

"It is," agreed Arcot quietly, "and I intend to throw that
star in such a way that we can escape between the twin
fields! We can escape between the hammer and the anvil
as millions of millions of millions of tons of matter crash into
each other."

"And you intend to swing that?" asked Wade in awe as
he thought of the spectacle there would be when two suns
fell into each other. "Well, I don't want to be around."

"You haven't any choice," Arcot grinned. Then his face
grew serious. "What I want to do is simple. We have the
molecular ray. Those stars are hot. They don't fall into
each other because they are rotating about each other.
Suppose that rotation were stopped—stopped suddenly and
completely? The molecular ray acts catalytically; we won't
supply the power to stop that star, the star itself will. All
we have to do is cause the molecules to move in a direction
opposite to the rotation. We'll supply the impulse, and the
star will supply the energy!

"Our job will be to break away when the stars get close
enough; we are really going to hitch our wagon to a star!

"The mechanics of the job are simple. We will have to
calculate when and how long to use the power, and when and
how quickly to escape. We'll have to use the main power
board to generate the ray and project it instead of the little
ray units. With luck, we ought to be free of this star in
three days!"

Work was started at once. They had a chance of life
in sight, and they had every intention of taking advantage of
it! The calculating machines they had brought would certainly
prove worth their mass in this one use. The observations
were extremely difficult because the ship was rocketing around
the star in such a rapid orbit. The calculations of the
mass and distance and orbital motion of the other star were
therefore very difficult, but the final results looked good.

The other star and this one formed a binary, the two
being of only slightly different mass and rotating about each
other at a distance of roughly two million miles.

The next problem was to calculate the time of fall from
that point, assuming that it would stop instantaneously, which
would be approximately true.

The actual fall would take only seven hours under the
tremendous acceleration of the two masses! Since the stars
would fall toward each other, the ship would be drawn toward
the falling mass, and since their orbit around the star
took only a fraction of a second to complete, they had to
make sure they were in the right position at the halfway
point just before collision occurred. Also, their orbit would
be greatly perturbed as the star approached, and it was
necessary to calculate that in, too.

Arcot calculated that in twenty-two hours, forty-six minutes,
they would be in the most favorable position to start the
fall. They could have started sooner, but there were some
changes that had to be made in the wiring of the ship before
they could start using the molecular ray at full power.

"Well," said Wade as he finally finished the laborious
computations, "I hope we don't make a mistake and get
caught between the two! And what happens if we find we
haven't stopped the star after all?"

"If we don't hit it exactly the first time," Morley replied,
"we'll have to juggle the ray until we do."

They set to work at once, installing the heavy leads to the
ray projectors, which were on the outside of the hull in
countersunk recesses. Morey and Wade had to go outside
the ship to help attach the cables.

Out in space, floating about the ship, they were still
weightless, for they, too, were supported by centrifugal
force.

The work of readjusting the projectors for greater power
was completed in an hour and a quarter, which still left
over twenty hours before they could use them. During the
next ten hours, they charged the great storage coils to capacity,
leaving the circuits to them open, controlled by the
relays only. That would keep the coils charged, ready to
start.

Finally, Wade dusted off his hands and said: "We're
all ready to go mechanically, and I think it would be wise
if we were ready physically, too. I know we're not very tired,
but if we sit around in suspense we'll be as nervous as cats
when the time comes. I suggest we take a couple of sleeping
tablets and turn in. If we use a mild shock to awaken us,
we won't oversleep."

The others agreed to the plan and prepared for their wait.

Awakened two hours before the actual moment of action,
Wade prepared breakfast, and Morey took observations.
He knew just where the star should be according to their
calculations, and looked for it there. He breathed a sigh of
relief—it was exactly in place! Their mathematics they had
been sure of, but on such a rapidly moving machine, it was
exceedingly difficult to make good observations.

The two hours seemed to drag interminably, but at last
Arcot signalled for the full power of the molecular rays.
They waited, breathlessly, for some response. Nearly twenty
seconds later, the other sun went out.

"We did it!" said Wade in a hushed voice. It was almost
a shock to realize that this ship had power enough to extinguish
a sun!

Arcot and Morey weren't awed; they didn't have time.
There were other things to do and do fast.

They had checked the time required for them to see that
the white dwarf had gone out. Half of this gave them the
distance from the star in light seconds.

The screen had already been rigged to flash the information
into a computer, which in turn gave a time signal to
the robot pilot that would turn on the drive at precisely the
right instant. There was no time for human error here; the
velocities were too great and the time for error too small.

Then they waited. They had to wait for seven hours
spinning dizzily around an improbably tiny star with an
equally improbably titanic gravitational field. A star only a
couple of dozens of miles across, and yet so dense that
it weighed half a million times as much as the Earth! And
they had to wait while another star like it, chilled now to
absolute zero, fell toward them!

"I wish we could stay around to see the splash," Arcot
said. "It's going to be something to see. All the kinetic energy
of those two masses slamming into each other is going
to be a blaze of light that will really be something!"

Wade was looking nervously at the telectroscope plate.
"I wish we could see that other sun. I don't like the idea
of a thing that big creeping up on us in the dark."

"Calm down," Morey said quietly. "It's out of our hands
now; we took a chance, and it was a chance we had to take.
If you want to watch something, watch Junior down there.
It's going to start doing some pretty interesting tricks."

As the dense black sun approached them, Junior, as Morey
had called it, did begin to do tricks. At first they seemed
to be optical effects, as though the eye itself were playing
tricks. The red, glowing ball beneath them began to grow
transparent around its surface, leaving an opaque red core
which seemed to be shrinking slowly.

"What's happening?" Fuller asked.

"Our orbit around the star is becoming more and more
elliptical," Arcot replied. "As the other sun pulls us, the
star beneath us grows smaller with the distance; then, as
we begin to fall back toward it, it grows larger again.
Since this is taking place many hundreds of times per second,
the visual pictures all seem to blend in together."

"Watch the clock," Morey said suddenly, pointing.

The men watched tensely as the hand moved slowly around.

"Ten—nine—eight—seven—six—five—four—three—two—one—ZERO!"

A relay slammed home, and almost instantaneously, everyone
on the ship was slammed into unconsciousness.

XII

Hours later, Arcot regained consciousness. It was quiet in
the ship. He was still strapped in his seat in the control
room. The relux screens were in place, and all was perfectly
peaceful. He didn't know whether the ship was motionless
or racing through space at a speed faster than light, and
his first semiconscious impulse was to see.

He reached out with an arm that seemed to be made of
dry dust, ready to crumble; an arm that would not behave.
His nerves were jumping wildly. He pulled the switch he
was seeking, and the relux screens dropped down as the
motors pulled them back.

They were in hyperspace; beside them rode the twin ghost
ships.

Arcot looked around, trying to decide what to do, but his
brain was clogged. He felt tired; he wanted to sleep. Scarcely
able to think, he dragged the others to their rooms and
strapped them in their bunks. Then he strapped himself in
and fell asleep almost at once.

Still more hours passed, then Arcot was waking slowly to
insistent shaking by Morey.

"Hey! Arcot! Wake up! ARCOT! HEY!"

Arcot's ears sent the message to his brain, but his brain
tried to ignore it. At last he slowly opened his eyes.

"Huh?" he said in a low, tired voice.

"Thank God! I didn't know whether you were alive or
not. None of us remembered going to bed. We decided you
must have carried us there, but you sure looked dead."

"Uhuh?" came Arcot's unenthusiastic rejoinder.

"Boy, is he sleepy!" said Wade as he drifted into the
room. "Use a wet cloth and some cold water, Morey."

A brisk application of cold water brought Arcot more
nearly awake. He immediately clamored for the wherewithal
to fill an aching void that was making itself painfully felt
in his midsection.

"He's all right!" laughed Wade. "His appetite is just as
healthy as ever!"

They had already prepared a meal, and Arcot was
promptly hustled to the galley. He strapped himself into the
chair so that he could eat comfortably, and then looked
around at the others. "Where the devil are we?"

"That," replied Morey seriously, "was just what we wanted
to ask you. We haven't the beginnings of an idea. We slept
for two days, all told, and by now we're so far from all the
Island Universes that we can't tell one from another. We
have no idea where we are.

"I've stopped the ship; we're just floating. I'm sure I don't
know what happened, but I hoped you might have an
idea."

"I have an idea," said Arcot. "I'm hungry! You wait
until after I've eaten, and I'll talk." He fell to on the food.

After eating, he went to the control room and found that
every gyroscope in the place had been thrown out of place
by the attractions they had passed through. He looked
around at the meters and coils.

It was obvious what had happened. Their attempt to escape
had been successful; they had shot out between the
stars, into the space. The energy had been drained from
the power coil, as they had expected. Then the power plant
had automatically cut in, recharging the coils in two hours.
Then the drive had come on again, and the ship had flashed
on into space. But with the gyroscopes as erratic as they
were, there was no way of knowing which direction they
had come; they were lost in space!

"Well, there are lots of galaxies we can go to," said Arcot.
"We ought to be able to find a nice one and stay there
if we can't get home again."

"Sure," Wade replied, "but I like Earth! If only we
hadn't all passed out! What caused that, Arcot?"

Arcot shrugged. "I'm sure I don't know. My only theory
is that the double gravitational field, plus our own power
field, produced a sort of cross-product that effected our
brains.

"At any rate, here we are."

"We certainly are," agreed Morey. "We can't possibly
back track; what we have to do is identify our own universe.
What identifying features does it have that will enable us
to recognize it?

"Our Galaxy has two 'satellites', the Greater and Lesser
Magellanic Clouds. If we spent ten years photographing and
studying and comparing with the photographs we already
have, we might find it. We know that system will locate the
Galaxy, but we haven't the time. Any other suggestions?"

"We came out here to visit planets, didn't we?" asked
Arcot. "Here's our chance—and our only chance—of getting
home, as far as I can see. We can go to any galaxy in the
neighborhood—within twenty or thirty million light years—and
look for a planet with a high degree of civilization.

"Then we'll give them the photographs we have, and ask
them if they've any knowledge of a galaxy with two such
satellites. We just keep trying until we find a race which
has learned through their research. I think that's the easiest,
quickest, and most satisfactory method. What do you think?"

It was the obvious choice, and they all agreed. The next
proposition was to select a galaxy.

"We can go to any one we wish," said Morey, "but we're
now moving at thirty thousand miles per second; it would
take us quite a while to slow down, stop, and go in the other
direction. There's a nice, big galactic nebula right in front
of us, about three days away—six million light years. Any
objections to heading for that?"

The rest looked at the glowing point of the nebula. Out
in space, a star is a hard, brilliant, dimensionless point of
light. But a nebula glows with a faint mistiness; they are
so far away that they never have any bright glow, such as
stars have, but they are so vast, their dimensions so great,
that even across millions of light years of space they appear
as tiny glowing discs with faint, indistinct edges. As the
men looked out of the clear lux metal windows, they saw
the tiny blur of light on the soft black curtain of space.

It was as good a course as any, and the ship's own inertia
recommended it; they had only to redirect the ship with
greater accuracy.

Setting the damaged gyroscopes came first, however.
There were a number of things about the ship that needed
readjustment and replacement after the strain of escaping
from the giant star.

After they had made a thorough inspection Arcot said:

"I think we'd best make all our repairs out here. That
flame that hit us burned off our outside microphone and
speaker, and probably did a lot of damage to the ray projectors.
I'd rather not land on a planet unarmed; the chances
are about fifty-fifty that we'd be greeted with open cannon
muzzles instead of open arms."

The work inside was left to Arcot and Fuller, while Morey
and Wade put on spacesuits and went out onto the hull.

They found surprisingly little damage—far less than they
had expected. True, the loudspeaker, the microphone, and
all other instruments made of ordinary matter had been
burned off clean. They didn't even have to clean out the
spaces where they had been recessed into the wall. At a
temperature of ten thousand degrees, the metals had all
boiled away—even tungsten boils at seven thousand degrees,
and all other normal matter boils even more easily.

The ray projectors, which had been adjusted for the high
power necessary to stop a sun in its orbit, were readjusted
for normal power, and the heat beams were replaced.

After nearly four hours work, everything had been checked,
from relays and switch points to the instruments and gyroscopes.
Stock had been taken, and they found they were
running low on replacement parts. If anything more happened,
they would have to stop using some of the machinery
and break it up for spare parts. Of their original supply of
twenty tons of lead fuel, only ten tons of the metal were
left, but lead was a common metal which they could easily
pick up on any planet they might visit. They could also get
a fresh supply of water and refill their air tanks there.

The ship was in as perfect condition as it had ever been,
for every bearing had been put in condition and the generators
and gyroscopes were running smoothly.

They threw the ship into full speed and headed for the
galaxy ahead of them.

"We are going to look for intelligent beings," Arcot reminded
the others, "so we'll have to communicate with them.
I suggest we all practice the telepathic processes I showed
you—we'll need them."

The time passed rapidly with something to do. They spent
a considerable part of it reading the books on telepathy
that Arcot had brought, and on practicing it with each
other.

By the end of the second day of the trip, Morey and
Fuller, who had peculiarly adaptable minds, were able to
converse readily and rapidly, Fuller doing the projecting and
Morey the receiving. Wade had divided his time about equally
between projecting and reading, with the result that he
could do neither well.

Early on the fourth day, they entered the universe toward
which they were heading. They had stopped at about half
a million light years and decided that a large local cluster
of very brilliant suns promised the best results, since the
stars were closer together there, and there were many of the
yellow G-0 type for which they were seeking.

They had penetrated into the galaxy as far as was safe,
using half speed; then, at lower speeds, they worked toward
the local cluster.

Arcot cut the drive several light years from the nearest
sun. "Well, we're where we wanted to be; now what do
we do? Morey, pick us out a G-0 star. We await your
royal command to move."

After a few minutes at the telectroscope, Morey pointed
to one of the pinpoints of light that gleamed brightly in the
sky. "That one looks like our best bet. It's a G-0 a little
brighter than Sol."

Morey swung the ship about, pointing the axis of the ship
in the same direction as its line of flight. The observatory
had been leading, but now the ship was turned to its normal
position.

They shot forward, using the space-strain drive, for a
full hour at one-sixteenth power. Then Arcot cut the drive,
and the disc of the sun was large before them.

"We're going to have a job cutting down our velocity;
we're traveling pretty fast, relative to that sun," Arcot told
the others. Their velocity was so great that the sun didn't
seem to swerve them greatly as they rushed nearer. Arcot
began to use the molecular drive to brake the ship.

Morey was busy with the telectroscope, although greatly
hampered by the fact that it was a feat of strength to hold
his arm out at right angles to his body for ten seconds under
the heavy acceleration Arcot was applying.

"This method works!" called Morey suddenly. "The Fuller
System For Finding Planets has picked another winner! Circle
the sun so that I can get a better look!"

Arcot was already trying vainly to decrease their velocity
to a figure that would permit the attraction of the sun to
hold them in its grip and allow them to land on a planet.

"As I figure it," Arcot said, "we'll need plenty of time
to come to rest. What do you think, Morey?"

Morey punched figures into the calculator. "Wow! Somewhere
in the neighborhood of a hundred days, using all the
acceleration that will be safe! At five gravities, reducing our
present velocity of twenty-five thousand miles per second to
zero will take approximately twenty-four hundred hours—one
hundred days! We'll have to use the gravitational attraction
of that sun to help us."

"We'll have to use the space control," said Arcot. "If we
move close to the sun by the space control, all the energy
of the fall will be used in overcoming the space-strain coil's
field, and thus prevent our falling. When we start to move
away again, we will be climbing against that gravity, which
will aid us in stopping. But even so, it will take us about
three days to stop. We wouldn't get anywhere using molecular
power; that giant sun was just too damned generous with
his energy of fall!"

They started the cycles, and, as Arcot had predicted, they
took a full three days of constant slowing to accomplish
their purpose, burning up nearly three tons of matter in
doing so. They were constantly oppressed by a load of five
gravities except for the short intervals when they stopped to
eat and when they were moving in the space control field.
Even in sleeping, they were forced to stand the load.

The massive sun was their principal and most effective
brake. At no time did they go more than a few dozen million
miles from the primary, for the more intense the gravity, the
better effect they got.

Morey divided his time between piloting the ship while
Arcot rested, and observing the system. By the end of the
third day, he had made very creditable progress with his
map.

He had located only six planets, but he was certain there
were others. For the sake of simplicity, he had assumed circular
orbits and calculated their approximate orbital velocities
from their distance from the sun. He had determined the
mass of the sun from direct weighings aboard their ship.
He soon had a fair diagram of the system constructed mathematically,
and experimental observation showed it to be a
very close approximation.

The planets were rather more massive than those of Sol.
The innermost planet had a third again the diameter of Mercury
and was four million miles farther from the primary.
He named it Hermes. The next one, which he named Aphrodite,
the Greek goddess corresponding to the Roman Venus,
was only a little larger than Venus and was some eight million
miles farther from its primary—seventy-five million miles
from the central sun.

The next, which Morey called Terra, was very much like
Earth. At a distance of a hundred and twenty-four million
miles from the sun, it must have received almost the same
amount of heat that Earth does, for this sun was considerably
brighter than Sol.

Terra was eight thousand two hundred miles in diameter,
with a fairly clear atmosphere and a varying albedo which
indicated clouds in the atmosphere. Morey had every reason
to believe that it might be inhabited, but he had no proof
because his photographs were consistently poor due to the
glare of the sun.

The rest of the planets proved to be of little interest. In
the place where, according to Bode's Law, another planet,
corresponding to Mars, should have been, there was only a
belt of asteroids. Beyond this was still another belt. And on
the other side of the double asteroid belt was the fourth
planet, a fifty-thousand-mile-in-diameter methane-ammonia
giant which Morey named Zeus in honor of Jupiter.

He had picked up a couple of others on his plates, but
he had not been able to tell anything about them as yet. In
any case, the planets Aphrodite and Terra were by far the
most interesting.

"I think we picked the right angle to come into this system,"
said Arcot, looking at Morey's photographs of the wide
bands of asteroids. They had come into the planetary group
at right angles to the plane of the ecliptic, which had allowed
them to miss both asteroid belts.

They started moving toward the planet Terra, reaching
their objective in less than three hours.

The globe beneath them was lit brightly, for they had
approached it from the daylight side. Below them, they
could see wide, green plains and gently rolling mountains,
and in a great cleft in one of the mountain ranges was a
shimmering lake of clearest blue.

The air of the planet screamed about them as they dropped
down, and the roar in the loudspeaker grew to a mighty
cataract of sound. Morey turned down the volume.

The sparkling little lake passed beneath them as they
shot on, seventy-five miles above the surface of the planet.
When they had first entered the atmosphere, they had the
impression of looking down on a vast, inverted bowl whose
edge rested on a vast, smooth table of deep violet velvet.
But as they dropped and the violet became bluer and bluer,
they experienced the strange optical illusion of "flopping" of
the scene. The bowl seemed to turn itself inside out, and
they were looking down at its inner surface.

They shot over a mountain range, and a vast plain spread
out before them. Here and there, in the far distance, they
could see darker spots caused by buckled geological strata.

Arcot swung the ship around, and they saw the vast horizon
swing about them as their sensation of "down" changed
with the acceleration of the turn. They felt nearly weightless,
for they were lifting again in a high arc.

Arcot was heading back toward the mountains they had
passed over. He dropped the ship again, and the foothills
seemed to rise to meet them.

"I'm heading for that lake," Arcot explained. "It seems
absolutely deserted, and there are some things we want to
do. I haven't had any decent exercise for the past two weeks,
except for straining under high gravity. I want to do some
swimming, and we need to distill some water for drink;
we need to refill the tanks in case of emergencies. If the atmosphere
contains oxygen, fine; if it doesn't, we can get it
out of the water by electrolysis.

"But I hope that air is good to breathe, because I've
been wanting a swim and a sun bath for a long time!"

XIII

The Ancient Mariner hung high in the air, poised twenty-five
miles above the surface of the little lake. Wade, as
chemist, tested the air while the others readied the distillation
and air condensation apparatus. By the time they had
finished, Wade was ready with his report.

"Air pressure about 20 psi at the surface; temperature
around ninety-five Fahrenheit. Composition: eighteen percent
oxygen, seventy-five percent nitrogen, four-tenths of one
percent carbon dioxide, residue—inert gasses. That's not including
water vapor, of which there is a fair amount.

"I put a canary into the air, and the bird liked it, so I
imagine it's quite safe except for bacteria, perhaps. Naturally,
at this altitude the air is germ-free."

"Good," said Morey, "then we can take our swim and
work without worrying about spacesuits."

"Just a minute!" Fuller objected. "What about those
germs Wade mentioned? If you think I'm going out in my
shorts where some flock of bacteria can get at my tender
anatomy, you've got another think coming!"

"I wouldn't worry about it," Wade said. "The chances
of organisms developing along the same evolutionary line is
quite slim. We may find the inhabitants of the same shape
as those of another world, because the human body is
fairly well constructed anatomically. The head is in a place
where it will be able to see over a wide area and it's in a
safe place. The hand is very useful and can be improved
upon but little. True, the Venerians have a second thumb,
but the principle is the same.

"But chemically, the bodies are probably very different.
The people of Venus are widely different chemically; the
bacteria that can make a Venerian deathly ill is killed the
instant it enters our body, or else it starves to death because
it can't find the kind of chemical food it needs to live. And
the same thing happens when a Venerian is attacked by an
Earthly microorganism.

"Even on Earth, evolution has produced such widely
varying types of life that an organism that can feed on one
is totally incapable of feeding on another. You, for instance,
couldn't catch tobacco mosaic virus, and the tobacco plant
can't catch the measles virus.

"You couldn't expect a microorganism to evolve here that
was capable of feeding on Earth-type tissues; they would
have starved to death long ago."

"What about bigger animals?" Fuller asked cautiously.

"That's different. You would probably be indigestible to
an alien carnivore, but he'd probably kill you first to find
out. If he ate you, it might kill him in the end, but that
would be small consolation. That's why we're going to go
out armed."

Arcot dropped the ship swiftly until they were hovering
a bare hundred feet over the waters of the lake. There was
a little stream winding its way down the mountainside, and
another which led the clear overflow away.

"I doubt if there's anything of great size in that lake,"
Arcot said slowly and thoughtfully. "Still, even small fish
might be deadly. Let's play safe and remove all forms of
life, bacterial and otherwise. A little touch of the molecular
motion ray, greatly diffused, will do the trick."

Since the molecular ray directed the motion of the molecules
of matter, it prevented chemical reactions from taking
place, even when greatly diffused; all the molecules tend
to go in the same direction to such an extent that the delicate
balance of chemical reactions that is life is upset. It is
too delicate a thing to stand any power that upsets the
reactions so violently. All things are killed instantly.

As the light haze of the ionized air below them glowed
out in a huge cone, the water of the lake heaved and seemed
to move in its depths, but there was no great movement of
the waters; they lost only a fraction of their weight. But
every living thing in that lake died instantly.

Arcot turned the ship, and the shining hull glided softly
over to one side of the lake where a little sandy beach invited
them. There seemed no indication of intelligent life
about.

Each of them took a load of the supplies they had brought,
and carried them out under the shade of an immense pine-like
tree—a gigantic column of wood that stretched far into
the sky to lose its green leaves in a waving sea of foliage.
The mottled sunlight of the bright star above them made
them feel very much at home. Its color, intensity, and warmth
were all exactly the same as on Earth.

Each of the men wore his power suit to aid in carrying
the things they had brought, for the gravity here was a
bit higher than that of Earth. The difference in air pressure
was so little as to be scarcely noticeable; they even
adjusted the interior of the ship to it.

They had every intention of staying here for awhile. It
was pleasant to lie in the warm sun once more; so pleasant
that it became difficult to remember that they were countless
trillions of long miles from their own home planet. It
was hard to realize that the warm, blazing star above them
was not Old Sol.

Arcot was carrying a load of food in a box. He had
neutralized his weight until, load and all, he weighed about
a hundred pounds. This was necessary in order to permit
him to drag a length of hose behind him toward the water,
so it could be used as an intake for the pumps.

Morey, meanwhile, was having trouble. He had been
carrying a load of assorted things to use—a few pneumatic
pillows, a heavy iron pot for boiling the water, and a number
of other things.

He reached his destination, having floated the hundred
or so feet from the ship by using his power suit. He forgot,
momentarily, and dropped his load. Immediately, he too
began to "drop"—upward! He had a buoyancy of around
three hundred pounds, and a weight of only two fifty. In
dropping the load, the sudden release had caused the
power unit to jerk him upward, and somehow the controlling
knob on the power pack was torn loose.

Morey shot up into the air, showing a fair rate of progress
toward his late abode—space! And he had no way to
stop himself. His hand power unit was far too weak to
overcome the pull of his power-pack, and he was rising
faster and faster!

He realized that his friends could catch him, and laughingly
called down: "Arcot! Help! I'm being kidnapped by
my power suit! To the rescue!"

Arcot looked up quickly at Morey's call and realized
immediately that his power control had come off. He knew
there was twenty miles or so of breathable air above, and
long before Morey rose that far, he could catch him in the
Ancient Mariner, if necessary.

He turned on his own power suit, using a lift of a hundred
pounds, which gave him double Morey's acceleration.
Quickly he gathered speed that shot him up toward his
helpless friend, and a moment later, he had caught up with
him and passed him. Then he shut off his power and drifted
to a halt before he began to drop again. As Morey rose
toward him, Arcot adjusted the power in his own suit to
match Morey's velocity.

Arcot grabbed Morey's leg and turned his power down
until he had a weight of fifty pounds. Soon they were both
falling again, and when their rate of fall amounted to approximately
twenty miles per hour, Arcot cut their weight
to zero and they continued down through their momentum.
Just short of the ground, he leaped free of Morey, who,
carried on by momentum, touched the ground a moment
later. Wade at once jumped in and held him down.

"Now, now! Calm yourself," said Wade solicitously. "Don't
go up in the air like that over the least little thing."

"I won't, if you'll get busy and take this damned thing
off—or fasten some lead to my feet!" replied Morey, starting
to unstrap the mechanism.

"You'd better hold your horses there," said Arcot. "If
you take that off now, we sure will need the Ancient Mariner
to catch up with it. It will produce an acceleration that no
man could ever stand—something on the order of five thousand
gravities, if the tubes could stand it. And since that
one is equipped with the invisibility apparatus, you'd be out
one good invisibility suit. Restrain yourself, boy, and I'll
go get a new knob control.

"Wade, get the boy a rock to hold him down. Better tie
it around his neck so he won't forget it and fly off into
space again. It's a nuisance locating so small an object in
space and I promised his father I'd bring the body back if
there was anything left of it." He released Morey as Wade
handed him a large stone.

A few minutes later, he returned with a new adjustment
dial and repaired Morey's apparatus. The strain was released
when he turned it, and Morey parted with the rock with
relief.

Morey grunted in relief, and looked at the offending
pack.

"You know, that being stuck with a sky-bound gadget
that you can't turn off is the nastiest combination of feeling
stupid, helpless, comical, silly and scared I've hit yet. It
now—somewhat late—occurs to me that this is powered with
a standard power coil, straight off the production line, and
that it has a standard overload cut-out for protection of associated
equipment. I want to install an emergency cutoff
switch, in case a knob, or something else, goes sour.
But I want to have the emergency overload where I can decide
whether or not an emergency overload is to be accepted.
I'd feel a sight more than silly if that overload relay popped
while I was a couple thousand feet up.

"Trouble with all this new stuff of ours is that we simply
haven't had time to find out all the 'I never thought of that'
things that can go wrong. If the grid resistor on that oscillator
went out, for instance, what would it do?"

Arcot cocked an eye at the power pack, visualizing the
circuits. "Full blast, straight up, and no control. But modern
printed resistors don't fail."

"That's what it says in all the books." Wade nodded
wisely. "And you should see the stock of replacement units
every electronics shop stocks for purposes of replacing infallible
units, too. You've got a point, my friend."

"I can see four ways we can change these things to fail-safe
operation, if we add Morey's emergency cut-off switch.
If it did go on-full then, you could use intermittent operation
and get down," Arcot acknowledged.

"Anybody know what silly fail-unsafe tricks we overlooked
in the Ancient Mariner?" Fuller asked.

"That," said Wade with a grimace, "is a silly question.
The 'I didn't think of that' type of failure occurs because I
didn't think of that, and the reason I didn't think of it is because
it never occurred to me. If we'd been able to think of
'em, we would have. We'll probably get stuck with a few
more yet, before we get back. But at least we can clean
up a few bugs in these things now."

"Forget it for now, Wade, and get that chow on," suggested
Fuller. He was lying on his back, clad only in a pair
of short trunks, completely relaxed and enjoying life. "We
can do that when it's dark here."

"Fuller has the right idea," said Morey, looking at Fuller
with a judicious eye. "I think I'll follow his example."

"Which makes three in favor and one on the way," said
Arcot, as he came out of the ship and sank down on the
soft sand of the beach.

They lay around for a while after lunch, and then decided
to swim in the cool waters of the lake. One of them
was to stand guard while the others went in swimming.
Standing guard consisted of lying on his back on the soft
sand, and staring up at the delightful contrast of lush green
foliage and deep blue sky.

It was several hours before they gathered up their things
and returned to the ship. They felt more rested than they
had before their exercise. They had not been tired before,
merely restless, and the physical exercise had made them far
more comfortable.

They gathered again in the control room. All the apparatus
had been taken in; the tanks were filled, and the compressed
oxygen replenished. They closed the airlock and
were ready to start again.

As they lifted into the air, Arcot looked at the lake that
was shrinking below them. "Nice place for a picnic; we'll
have to remember that place. It isn't more than twenty
million light years from home."

"Yes," agreed Morey, "it is handy. But suppose we find
out where home is first; let's go find the local inhabitants."

"Excellent idea. Which way do we go to look?" Wade
asked.

"This lake must have an outlet to the sea," Morey answered.
"I suggest we follow it. Most rivers of any size have
a port near the mouth, and a port usually means a city."

"Let's go," said Arcot, swinging the shining ship about
and heading smoothly down along the line of the little
stream that had its beginning at the lake. They moved on
across the mountains and over the green foothills until they
came to a broad, rolling plain.

"I wonder if this planet is inhabited," Arcot mused. "None
of this land seems to be cultivated."

Morey had been scanning the horizon with a pair of
powerful binoculars. "No, the land isn't cultivated, but take
a look over there—see that range of little hills over to the
right? Take a look." He handed the binoculars to Arcot.

Arcot looked long and quietly. At last he lowered the
binoculars and handed them to Wade, who sat next to him.

"It looks like the ruins of a city," Arcot said. "Not the
ruins that a storm would make, but the ruins that high explosives
would make. I'd say there had been a war and the
people who once lived here had been driven off."

"So would I," rejoined Morey. "I wonder if we could find
the conquerors?"

"Maybe—unless it was mutual annihilation!"

They rose a bit higher and raised their speed to a thousand
miles an hour. On and on they flew, high above the
gently rolling plain, mile after mile. The little brooklet became
a great river, and the river kept growing more and
more. Ahead of them was a range of hills, and they wondered
how the river could thread its way among them. They
found that it went through a broad pass that twisted tortuously
between high mountains.

A few miles farther on, they came to a great natural basin
in the pass, a wide, level bowl. And in almost the exact center,
they saw a looming mass of buildings—a great city!

"Look!" cried Morey. "I told you it was inhabited!"

Arcot winced. "Yes, but if you shout in my ear like that
again, you'll have to write things out for me for ever after."
He was just as excited as Morey, nevertheless.

The great mass of the city was shaped like a titanic cone
that stood half mile high and was fully a mile and a half
in radius. But the remarkable thing about it was the perfect
uniformity with which the buildings and every structure
seemed to conform to this plan. It seemed as though an invisible,
but very tangible line had been drawn in the air.

It was as though a sign had been posted: "Here there
shall be buildings. Beyond this line, no structure shall extend,
nor any vehicle go!"

The air directly above the city was practically packed
with slim, long, needle-like ships of every size—from tiny
private ships less than fifteen feet long to giant freighters
of six hundred feet and longer. And every one of them conformed
to the rule perfectly!

Only around the base of the city there seemed to be a
slight deviation. Where the invisible cone should have
touched the ground, there was a series of low buildings made
of some dark metal, and all about them the ground appeared
scarred and churned.

"They certainly seem to have some kind of ray screen
over that city," Morey commented. "Just look at that perfect
cone effect and those low buildings are undoubtedly
the projectors."

Arcot had brought the ship to a halt as he came through
the pass in the mountain. The shining hull was in the cleft
of the gorge, and was, no doubt, quite hard to see from
the city.

Suddenly, a vagrant ray of the brilliant sun reached down
through a break in the overcast of clouds and touched the
shining hull of the Ancient Mariner with a finger of gold.
Instantly, the ship shone like the polished mirror of a heliograph.

Almost immediately, a low sound came from the distant
city. It was a pulsing drone that came through the microphone
in a weird cadence; a low, beating drone, like some
wild music. Louder and stronger it grew, rising in pitch
slowly, then it suddenly ended in a burst of rising sound—a
terrific whoop of alarm.

As if by magic, every ship in the air above the city shot
downward, dropping suddenly out of sight. In seconds, the
air was cleared.

"It seems they've spotted us," said Arcot in a voice he
tried to make nonchalant.

A fleet of great, long ships was suddenly rising from the
neighborhood of the central building, the tallest of the group.
They went in a compact wedge formation and shot swiftly
down along the wall of the invisible cone until they were
directly over the low building nearest the Ancient Mariner.
There was a sudden shimmer in the air. In an instant, the
ships were through and heading toward the Ancient Mariner
at a tremendous rate.

They shot forward with an acceleration that was astonishing
to the men in the spaceship. In perfect formation, they
darted toward the lone, shining ship from far-off Earth!

XIV

The four earthmen watched the fleet of alien ships roar
through the air toward them.

"Now how shall we signal them?" asked Morey, also trying
to be nonchalant, and failing as badly as Arcot had.

"Don't try the light beam method," cautioned Arcot. The
last time they had tried to use a light beam signal was
when they first contacted the Nigrans. The Nigrans thought
it was some kind of destruction ray. That had started the
terrible destructive war of the Black Star.

"Let's just hang here peaceably and see what they
do," Arcot suggested.

Motionless, the Ancient Mariner hung before the advancing
attack of the great battle fleet. The shining hull was a
thing of beauty in the golden sunlight as it waited for the
advancing ships.

The alien ships slowed as they approached and spread
out in a great fan-shaped crescent.

Suddenly, the Ancient Mariner gave a tremendous leap
and hurtled toward them at a terrific speed, under an acceleration
so great that Arcot was nearly hurled into unconsciousness.
He would have been except for the terrific mass
of the ship. To produce that acceleration in so great a mass,
a tremendous force was needed, a force that even made the
enemy fleet reel under its blow!

But, sudden as it was, Arcot had managed to push the
power into reverse, using the force of the molecular drive to
counteract the attraction the aliens had brought to bear.

The whole mighty fabric of the ship creaked as the titanic
load came upon it. They were using a force of a million
tons!

The mighty lux beams withstood the stress, however, and
the ship came to a halt, then was swiftly backing away
from the alien battle fleet.

"We can give them all they want!" said Arcot grimly.
He noticed that Wade and Fuller had been knocked out
by the sudden blow, but Morey, though slightly groggy, was
still in possession of his senses.

"Let's not," Morey remonstrated. "We may be able to
make friends with them, but not if we kill them off."

"Right!" replied Arcot, "but we're going to give them a
little demonstration of power!"

The Ancient Mariner leaped suddenly upward with a
speed that defied the eyes of the men at the rays of the
enemy ships. Then, as they turned to follow the sudden
motion of the ship—it was not there!

The Ancient Mariner had vanished!

Morey was startled for an instant as the ship and his
companions disappeared around him, then he realized what
had happened. Arcot had used the invisibility apparatus!

Arcot turned and raced swiftly far off to one side, behind
the strange ships, and hovered over the great cliff that
made the edge of the cleft that was the river bed. Then he
snapped the ship into full visibility.

Wade and Fuller had recovered by now, and Arcot started
barking out orders. "Wade—Fuller—take the molecular ray,
Wade, and tear down that cliff—throw it down into the
valley. Fuller, turn the heat beams on with all the power
you can get and burn that refuse he tears down into a heap
of molten lava!

"I'm going to show them what we can do! And, Wade—after
Fuller gets it melted down, throw the molten lava high
in the air!"

From the ship, a long pencil of rays, faintly violet from
the air they ionized, reached out and touched the cliff. In
an instant, it had torn down a vast mass of the solid rock,
which came raining down into the valley with a roaring
thunder and threw the dirt of the valley into the air like
splashed mud.

Then the violet ray died, and two rays of blinding brilliance
reached out. The rock was suddenly smoking, steaming.
Then it became red, dull at first, then brighter and
brighter. Suddenly it collapsed into a great pool of white-hot
lava, flowing like water under the influence of the beams
from the ship.

Again the pale violet of the molecular beams touched the
rock—which was now bubbling lava. In an instant, the great
mass of flaming incandescent rock was flying like a glowing
meteor, up into the air. It shot up with terrific speed, broke
up in mid-air, and fell back as a rain of red-hot stone.

The bright rays died out, but the pale fingers of the
molecular beams traced across the level ground. As they
touched it, the solid soil spouted into the air like some vast
fountain, to fall back as frost-covered powder.

The rays that had swung a sun into destruction were at
work! What chance had man, or the works of man against
such? What mattered a tiny planet when those rays could
hurl one mighty sun into another, to blaze up in an awful
conflagration that would light up space for a million light
years around with a mighty glare of light!

As if by a giant plow, the valley was torn and rent in
great streaks by the pale violet rays of the molecular force.
Wade tore loose a giant boulder and sent it rocketing into
the heavens. It came down with a terrific crash minutes
later, to bury itself deep in the soil as it splintered into
fragments.

Suddenly the Ancient Mariner was jerked violently again.
Evidently undaunted by their display of power, the aliens'
rays had gripped the Earthmen's ship again and were drawing
it with terrific acceleration. But this time the ship was
racing toward the city, caught by the beam of one of the
low-built, sturdy buildings that housed the protective ray
projectors.

Again Arcot threw on the mighty power units that drove
the ship, bracing them against the pull of the beam.

"Wade! Use the molecular ray! Stop that beam!" Arcot ordered.

The ship was stationary, quivering under the titanic forces
that struggled for it. The enemy fleet raced toward them,
trying to come to the aid of the men in the tower.

The pale glow of the molecular beam reached out its
ghostly finger and touched the heavy-walled ray projector
building. There was a sudden flash of discharging energy,
and the tower was hurled high in the air, leaving only a
gaping hole in the ground.

Instantly, with the collapse of the beam that held it, the
Ancient Mariner shot backward, away from the scene of the
battle. Arcot snapped off the drive and turned on the invisibility
apparatus. They hung motionless, silent and invisible
in the air, awaiting developments.

In close formation, one group of ships blocked the opening
in the wall of rays that the removal of one projector
building had caused. Three other ships went to investigate
the wreck of the building that had fallen a mile away.

The rest of the fleet circled the city, darting around,
searching frantically for the invisible enemy, fully aware
of the danger of collision. The unnerving tension of expecting
it every second made them erratic and nervous to the nth
degree.

"They're sticking pretty close to home," said Arcot. "They
don't seem to be too anxious to play with us."

"They don't, do they?" Morey said, looking angry. "They
might at least have been willing to see what we wanted. I
want to investigate some other cities. Come on!" He had
thoroughly enjoyed the rest at the little mountain lake, and
he was disappointed that they had been driven away. Had
they wanted to, he knew, they could easily have torn the
entire city out by the roots!

"I think we ought to smash them thoroughly," said Wade.
"They're certainly inhospitable people!"

"And I, for one, would like to know what that attraction
ray was," said Fuller curiously.

"The ray is easily understood after you take a look at
the wreck it made of some of these instruments," Arcot told
him. "It was projected magnetism. I can see how it might
be done if you worked on it for a while. The ray simply attracted
everything in its path that was magnetic, which included
our lux metal hull.

"Luckily, most of our apparatus is shielded against magnetism.
The few things that aren't can be repaired easily.
But I'll bet Wade finds his gear in the galley thrown around
quite a bit."

"Where do we go from here, then?" Wade asked.

"Well, this world is bigger than Earth," said Morey. "Even
if they're afraid to go out of their cities to run farms, they
must have other cities. The thing that puzzles me, though,
is how they do it—I don't see how they can possibly raise
enough food for a city in the area they have available!"

"'People couldn't possibly live in hydrogen instead of
oxygen'," Arcot quoted, grinning. "That's what they told me
when I made my little announcement at the meeting on the
Black Star situation. The only trouble was—they did. That
suggestion of yours meets the same fate, Morey!"

"All right, you win," agreed Morey. "Now let's see if we
can find the other nations on this world more friendly."

Arcot looked at the sun. "We're now well north of the
equator. We'll go up where the air is thin, put on some
speed, and go into the south temperate zone. We'll see if we
can't find some people there who are more peaceably inclined."

Arcot cut off the invisibility tubes. Instantly, all the enemy
ships in the neighborhood turned and darted toward
them at top speed. But the shining Ancient Mariner darted
into the deep blue vault of the sky, and a moment later was
lost to their view.

"They had a lot of courage," said Arcot, looking down
at the city as it sank out of sight. "It doesn't take one-quarter
as much courage to fight a known enemy, no matter
how deadly, as it does to fight an unknown enemy force—something
that can tear down mountains and throw their
forts into the air like toys."

"Oh, they had courage, all right," Morey conceded, "but
I wish they hadn't been quite so anxious to display it!"

They were high above the ground now, accelerating with
a force of one gravity. Arcot cut the acceleration down until
there was just enough to overcome the air resistance, which,
at the height they were flying, was very low. The sky
was black above them, and the stars were showing around
the blazing sun. They were unfamiliar stars in unfamiliar constellations—the
stars of another universe.

In a very short time, the ship was dropping rapidly
downward again, the horizontal power off. The air resistance
slowed them rapidly. They drifted high over the south
temperate zone. Below them stretched the seemingly endless
expanse of a great blue-green ocean.

"They don't lack for water, do they?" Wade commented.

"We could pretty well figure on large oceans," Arcot
said. "The land is green, and there are plenty of clouds."

Far ahead, a low mass of solid land appeared above the
blue of the horizon. It soon became obvious that it was not
a continent they were approaching, but a large island, stretching
hundreds of miles north and south.

Arcot dropped the ship lower; the mountainous terrain
had become so broken that it would be impossible to detect
a city from thirty miles up.

The green defiles of the great mountains not only provided
good camouflage, but kept any great number of ships
from attacking the sides, where the ray stations were. The
cities were certainly located with an eye for war! Arcot
wondered what sort of conflict had lasted so long that cities
were designed for perpetual war. Had they never had peace?

"Look!" Fuller called. "There's another city!" Below them,
situated in a little natural bowl in the mountains, was another
of the cone cities.

Wade and Fuller manned the ray projectors again; Arcot
dropped the ship toward the city, one hand on the reverse
switch in case the inhabitants tried to use the magnetic beam
again.

At last, they had come quite low. There were no ships
in the air, and no people in sight.

Suddenly, the outside microphone picked up a low,
humming sound. A long, cigar-shaped object was heading
toward the ship at high speed. It had been painted a dark,
mottled green, and was nearly invisible against background
of foliage beneath the ship.

"Wade! Catch that on the ray!" Arcot commanded sharply,
moving the ship to one side at the same time. Instantly, the
guided missile turned and kept coming toward them.

Wade triggered the molecular beam, and the missile was
suddenly dashing toward the ground with terrific speed.
There was a terrific flash of flame and a shock wave of concussion.
A great hole gaped in the ground.

"They sure know their chemistry," remarked Wade, looking
down at the great hole the explosion had torn in the
ground. "That wasn't atomic, but on the other hand, it
wasn't dynamite or TNT, either! I'd like to know what they
use!"

"Personally," said Arcot angrily, "I think that was more
or less a gentle hint to move on!" He didn't like the way
they were being received; he had wanted to meet these
people. Of course, the other planet might be inhabited,
but if it wasn't—

"I wonder—" said Morey thoughtfully. "Arcot, those people
were obviously warned against our attack—probably
by that other city. Now, we've come nearly halfway around
this world; certainly we couldn't have gone much farther
away and still be on the planet. And we find this city in
league with the other! Since this league goes halfway around
the world, and they expected us to do the same, isn't it
fair to assume, just on the basis of geographical location,
that all this world is in one league?"

"Hmmm—an interplanetary war," mused Arcot. "That would
certainly prove that one of the other planets is inhabited.
The question is—which one?"

"The most probable one is the next inner planet, Aphrodite,"
replied Morey.

Arcot fired the ship into the sky. "If your conclusions are
correct—and I think they are—I see no reason to stay on
this planet. Let's go see if their neighbors are less aggressive!"

With that, he shot the ship straight up, rotating the axis
until it was pointing straight away from the planet. He increased
the acceleration until, as they left the outer fringes
of the atmosphere, the ship was hitting a full four gravities.

"I'm going to shorten things up and use the space
control," Arcot said. "The gravitational field of the sun will
drain a lot of our energy out, but so what? Lead is cheap,
and before we're through, we'll have plenty or I'll know
the reason why!"

Dr. Richard Arcot was angry—boiling all the way through!

XV

There was the familiar tension in the air as the space
field built up and they were hurled suddenly forward; the
star-like dot of the planet suddenly expanded as they rushed
forward at a speed far greater than that of light. In a moment,
it had grown to a disc; Arcot stopped the space control.
Again they were moving forward on molecular drive.

Very shortly, Arcot began to decelerate. Within ten minutes,
they were beginning to feel the outermost wisps of
the cloud-laden atmosphere. The heat of the blazing sun
was intense; the surface of the planet was, no doubt, a far
warmer place than Earthmen would find comfortable. They
would have been far better suited to remain on the other
planet, but they very evidently were not wanted!

They dropped down through the atmosphere, sinking for
miles as the ship slowed to the retarding influence of the
air and the molecular power. Down they went, through mile
after mile of heavy cloud layer, unable to see the ground
beneath them.

Then, suddenly, the thick, all-enveloping mists that held
them were gone. They were flying smoothly along under
leaden skies—perpetual, dim, dark clouds. Despite the brightness
of the sun above them, the clouds made the light dim
and gray. They reflected such an enormous percentage of
the light that struck them that the climate was not as hot
as they had feared.

The ground was dark under its somber mantle of clouds;
the hills, the rivers that crawled across wide plains, and the
oddly stunted forests all looked as though they had been
modeled in a great mass of greenish-gray putty. It was a discouraging
world.

"I'm glad we didn't wait for our swim here," remarked
Wade. "It sure looks like rain."

Arcot stopped the ship and held it motionless at ten miles
while Wade made his chemical analysis of the air. The report
looked favorable; plenty of oxygen and a trace of carbon
dioxide mixed with nitrogen.

"But the water vapor!" Wade said. "The air is saturated
with it! It won't be the heat, but the humidity that'll bother
us—to coin a phrase."

Arcot dropped the ship still farther, at the same time
moving forward toward a sea he had seen in the distance.
Swiftly, the ground sped beneath them. The low plain
sloped toward the sea, a vast, level surface of gray, leaden
water.

"Oh, brother, what a pleasant world," said Fuller sarcastically.

It was certainly not an inspiring scene. The leaden skies,
the heavy clouds, the dark land, and the gray-green of the
sea, always shaded in perpetual half-light, lest the burning
sun heat them beyond endurance. It was a gloomy world.

They turned and followed the coast. Still no sign of
inhabitants was visible. Mile after mile passed beneath them
as the shining ship followed up the ragged shore. Small
indentations and baylets ran into a shallow, level sea. This
world had no moon, so it was tideless, except for the slight
solar tides.

Finally, far ahead of them, and well back from the coast,
Arcot spotted a great mountain range.

"I'm going to head for that," he told the others. "If
these people are at war with our very inimical friends of
the other planet, chances are they'll put their cities in the
mountains, too."

They had such cities. The Ancient Mariner had penetrated
less than a hundred miles along the twisted ranges
of the mountains before they saw, far ahead, a great, cone-shaped
city. The city was taller, larger than those of the
other planet, and the cone ran up farther from the actual
city buildings, leaving the aircraft more room.

Arcot stopped and watched the city a long time through
the telescope. It seemed similar to the others in all respects.
The same type of needle-like ships floated in the air above
it, and the same type of cone ray projectors nestled in the
base of the city's invisible protection.

"We may as well take a chance," said Arcot. He shot
the ship forward until they were within a mile of the city,
in plain sight of the inhabitants.

Suddenly, without any warning signal, apparently, all
the air traffic went wild—then it was gone. Every ship
seemed to have ducked into some unseen place of refuge.

Within a few minutes, a fleet of battleships was winging
its way toward the invisible barrier. Then it was out, and,
in a great semi-cylinder a quarter of a mile high, and a quarter
of a mile in radius, they advanced toward the Ancient
Mariner.

Arcot kept the ship motionless. He knew that their only
weapon was the magnetic ray; otherwise they would have
won the war long ago. And he knew he could cope with
magnetism.

Slowly the ships advanced. At last, they halted a quarter
of a mile from the Earth ship. A single ship detached
itself from the mass and advanced to within a few hundred
feet of the Ancient Mariner.

Quickly, Arcot jumped to his feet. "Morey, take the
controls. Evidently they want to parley, not fight. I'm going
over there."

He ran the length of the corridor to his room and put
on his power suit. A moment later, he left the airlock and
launched himself into space, flying swiftly toward the ship.
He had come alone, but armed as he was, he was probably
more than a match for anything they could bring to bear on
him.

He went directly toward the broad expanse of glass that
marked the control room of the alien ship and looked in
curiously.

The pilot was a man much like Arcot; quite tall, and of
tremendous girth, with a huge chest and great powerful
arms. His hands, like those of the Venerians, had two thumbs.

With equal curiosity, the man stared at Arcot, floating in
the air without apparent means of support.

Arcot hung there a moment, then motioned that he wished
to enter. The giant alien motioned him around to the side
of the ship. Halfway down the length of the ship, Arcot
saw a port suddenly open. He flew swiftly forward and entered.

The man who stood there was a giant as tall as Wade
and even more magnificently muscled, with tremendous shoulders
and giant chest. His thighs, rounded under a close-fitting
gray uniform, were bulging with smooth muscle.

He was considerably larger than the man in the pilot
room, and whereas the other had been a pale yellow in color,
this man was burned to a more healthy shade of tan. His
features were regular and pleasing; his hair was black and
straight; his high forehead denoted a high degree of intelligence,
and his clear black eyes, under heavy black eyebrows,
seemed curious, but friendly.

His nose was rather thin, but not sharp, and his mouth
was curved in a smile of welcome. His chin was firm and
sharp, distinct from his face and neck.

They looked each other over, and Arcot smiled as their
eyes met.

"Torlos," said the alien, pointing to his great chest.

"Arcot," replied the Earthman, pointing to himself. Then
he pointed to the stranger. "Torlos." He knew he hadn't
pronounced it exactly as the alien had, but it would suffice.

The stranger smiled in approval. "Ahcut," he said, pointing
to the Earthman.

Then he pointed to the comparatively thin arms of the
Earthman, and to his own. Then he pointed to Arcot's head
and to the mechanism he wore on his back, then to his own
head, and went through the motions of walking with great
effort.

Again he pointed at Arcot's head, nodding his own in
approval.

Arcot understood immediately what was meant. The alien
had indicated that the Earthman was comparatively weak,
but that he had no need of muscle, for he made his head
and his machines work for him. And he had decided that
the head was better!

Arcot looked at the man's eyes and concentrated on the
idea of friendship, projecting it with all his mental power.
The black eyes suddenly widened in surprise, which quickly
turned to pleasure as he tried to concentrate on one thought.

It was difficult for Arcot to interpret the thoughts of
the alien; all his concepts were in a different form. At last,
he caught the idea of location—but it was location in the
interrogative! How was he to interpret that?

Then it hit him. Torlos was asking: "Where are you from?"

Arcot pulled a pad of paper and a pencil from his pocket
and began to sketch rapidly. First, he drew the local galaxy,
with dots for stars, and swept his hand around him. He made
one of the dots a little heavier and pointed at the bright
blur in the cloudy sky above them. Then he drew a circle
around that dot and put another dot on it, at the same
time indicating the planet beneath them.

Torlos showed that he understood.

Arcot continued. At the other end of the paper, he drew
another galaxy, and indicated Earth. Then he drew a dotted
line from Earth to the planet they were now on.

Torlos looked at him in incredulous wonder. Again he
indicated his respect for Arcot's brain.

Arcot smiled and indicated the city. "Can we go there?"
he projected into the other's mind.

Torlos turned and glanced toward the end of the corridor.
There was no one in sight, so he shouted an order in
a deep, pleasant voice. Instantly, another giant man came
striding down the corridor with a lithe softness that indicated
tremendous muscular power, excellently controlled. He saluted
by placing his left hand over the right side of his chest.
Arcot noted that for future reference.

Torlos spoke to the other alien for a moment. The other
left and returned a minute later and said something to Torlos.
Torlos turned to Arcot indicating that he should return
to his ship and follow them.

Arcot suddenly turned his eyes and looked directly into
the black eyes of the alien. "Torlos," he projected, "will
you come with us on our ship?"

"I am commander of this ship. I can not go without the
permission of my chief. I will ask my chief."

Again he turned and left Arcot. He was back in a few
minutes carrying a small handbag. "I can go. This keeps me
in communication with my ship."

Arcot adjusted his weight to zero and floated lightly out
the doorway. He rose about six feet above the landing,
then indicated to Torlos that he was to grasp Arcot's feet, one
in each hand. Torlos closed a grip of steel about each ankle
and stepped off the platform.

At once, they dropped, for the power suit had not been
adjusted to the load. Arcot yelped in pain as Torlos, in his
surprise at not floating, involuntarily gripped tighter. Quickly,
Arcot turned on more power and gasped as he felt the
weight mount swiftly. He had estimated Torlos' weight at
two hundred seventy or so—and it was more like three hundred
and fifty! Soon, however, he had the weight adjusted,
and they floated easily up toward the Ancient Mariner.

They floated in through the door of the ship, and, once
inside, Torlos released his hold. Arcot was immediately
slammed to the roof with a weight of three hundred and fifty
pounds!

A moment later, he was again back on the floor, rubbing
his back. He shook his head and frowned, then smiled
and pretended to limp.

"Don't let go so suddenly," he admonished telepathically.

"I did not know. I am sorry," Torlos thought contritely.

"Who's your friend?" asked Wade as he entered the
corridor. "He certainly looks husky."

"He is," Arcot affirmed. "And he must be weighted with
lead! I thought he'd pull my legs off. Look at those arms!"

"I don't want to get him mad at me," Wade grinned.
"He looks like he'd make a mean opponent. What's his name?"

"Torlos," replied Arcot, just as Fuller stepped in.

Torlos was looking curiously at a crowbar that had been
lying in a rack on the wall. He picked it up and flexed it a
bit, as a man might flex a rapier to test its material. Then
he held it far out in front of him and proceeded to tie a
knot in the inch-thick metal bar! Then, still frowning in
puzzlement, he untied it, straightened it as best he could,
and put it back in the rack.

The Earthmen were staring in utter astonishment to see
the terrific strength the man displayed.

He smiled as he turned to them again.

"If he could do that at arm's length," Wade said thoughtfully,
"what could he do if he really tried?"

"Why don't you try and see?" Fuller asked sweetly.

"I can think of easier—but probably no quicker—ways
of committing suicide," Wade replied.

Arcot laughed and, looking at Torlos, projected the general
meaning of the last remarks. Torlos joined them in the
laugh.

"All my people are strong," he thought. "I can not understand
why you are not. That was a tool? We could not
use it so; it is too weak."

Wade and the others picked up the thought, and Wade
laughed. "I suppose they use old I-beams to tie up their
Christmas presents."

Arcot held a moment of silent consultation with Torlos,
then turned to the others. "We are supposed to follow these
men to their city to have some kind of an audience with
their ruler, according to Torlos. Let's get started; the rest of
the fleet is waiting."

Arcot led Torlos through the main engine room, and was
going into the main coil room when Torlos stopped him.

"Is this all your drive apparatus?" he thought.

"Yes, it is," Arcot projected.

"It is smaller than the power equipment of a small private
machine!" His thoughts radiated surprise. "How could
you make so great a distance?"

"Power," said Arcot. "Look!" He drew his molecular ray
pistol. "This alone is powerful enough to destroy all your
battle fleet without any danger on our part. And, despite
your strength, you are helpless against me!"

Arcot touched a switch on his belt and vanished.

In amazement, Torlos reached out a hand to the spot
where Arcot had stood. There was nothing there. Suddenly,
he turned, touching the back of his head. Something had
tugged at his hair!

He looked all around him and moved his arms around—to
no avail. There was nothing there.

Then, in the blink of an eye, Arcot was floating in the
air before him. "What avails strength against air, Torlos?"
he asked, smiling.

"For safety's sake," Torlos thought, "I want to be your
friend!" He grinned widely.

Arcot led the way on into the control room, where Morey
had already started to follow the great fleet toward the city.

"What are we going to do at the city?" Arcot asked Torlos
telepathically.

"This is the capital of the world, Sator, and here is the
commander-of-all-military-and-civil-forces. It is he you will
see. He has been summoned," Torlos replied carefully.

"We visited the third world of this system first," Arcot
told the alien, "and they repulsed us. We tried to be friendly,
but they attacked us at once. In order to keep from being
damaged, we had to destroy one of their city-protecting ray
buildings." This last thought was hard to transmit; Arcot
had pictured mentally a scene in which the ray building was
ripped out of the ground and hurled into the air.

In sudden anxiety and concern, Torlos stared into Arcot's
eyes. And in that look, Arcot read what even telepathy had
hidden heretofore.

"Did you destroy the city?" asked Torlos anxiously. But
it was not the question of a man hoping for the destruction
of his enemies' cities; Arcot got the mental picture of the
city, but with it, he picked up the idea of "home"! Of
course, the ideas of "city" and "home" might be synonymous
with these people; they never seemed to leave their cities.
But why this feeling of worry?

"No, we didn't want to hurt them," Arcot thought. "We
destroyed the ray building only in self defense."

"I understand." Despite obvious mental efforts, Torlos
positively radiated a feeling of relief!

"Are you at war with that world?" Arcot asked coolly.

"The two worlds have been at war for many generations,"
Torlos said, then quickly changed the subject. "You
will soon meet the leader of all the forces of Sator. He is
all-powerful here. His word must be absolutely obeyed. It
would be wise if you did not unnecessarily offend him. I see
from what your mind tells me that you have great power, but
there are many ships on Sator, more than Nansal can boast.

"Our commander, Horlan, is a military commander, but
since every man is necessarily a soldier, he is a true ruler."

"I understand," Arcot thought. He turned to Morey and
spoke in English, which Torlos could not understand. "Morey,
we're going to see the top man here. He rules the army,
which runs everything. You and I will go, and leave Wade
and Fuller behind as a rear guard. It may not be dangerous,
but after being chased off one world, we ought to be
as careful as possible.

"We'll go fully armed, and we'll stay in radio contact at
all times. Watch yourselves; we don't want them even to
touch this ship until we know what kind of people they
are."

They had followed the Satorian ships toward the city. The
giant magnetic ray barrier opened for them, and the Ancient
Mariner followed. They were inside the alien city.

XVI

Below the Ancient Mariner, the great buildings of the alien
city jutted up in the gray light of this gray world; their massiveness
seemed only to accentuate the depressing light.

On the broad roofs, they saw hundreds of people coming
out to watch them as they moved across the city. According
to Torlos, they were the first friendly strangers they had
ever seen. They had explored all the planets of this system
without finding friendly life.

The buildings sloped up toward the center of the city,
and the mass of the great central building loomed before
them.

The fleet that was leading the Earth ship settled down to
a wide courtyard that surrounded the building. Arcot dropped
the Ancient Mariner down beside them. The men from Torlos'
ship formed into two squads as they came out of the
airlocks and marched over to the great shining ship of Earth.
They formed two neat rows, one on each side of the airlock.

"Come on, Morey," said Arcot. "We're wanted. Wade,
keep the radio going at full amplification; the building may
cut out some of the power. I'll try to keep you posted on
what's going on, but we'll probably be busy answering questions
telepathically."

Arcot and Morey followed Torlos out into the dim light
of the gray sky, walking across the courtyard between the
ranks of the soldiers from Torlos' ship.

Before them was a heavy gate of solid bronze which
swung on massive bronze hinges. The building seemed to
be made of a dense, gray stone, much like granite, which
was depressing in its perfectly unrelieved front. There were
no bright spots of color as there were on all Earthly and
Venerian structures. Even the lines were grimly utilitarian;
there seemed to be no decoration.

Through the great bronze door they walked, and across
a small vestibule. Then they were in a mighty concourse, a
giant hallway that went completely through the structure.
All around them great granite pillars rose to support the
mighty building above. Square cut, they lent but little grace
to the huge room, but the floor and walls were made of a
hard, light green stone, almost the same color as foliage.

On one wall there was a giant tablet, a great plaque
fifteen feet high, made of a deep violet stone, and inlaid with
a series of characters in the language of this world. Like
English letters, they seemed to read horizontally, but whether
they read from left to right or right to left there was no way
of knowing. The letters themselves were made of some red
metal which Arcot and Morey didn't recognize.

Arcot turned to Torlos and projected a thought: "What
is that tablet?"

"Ever since the beginning of the war with the other planet,
Nansal, the names of our mighty leaders have been inscribed
on that plaque in the rarest metal."

The term "rarest metal" was definite to Torlos, and Arcot
decided to question him further on the meaning of it when
time permitted.

They crossed the great hall and came to what was evidently
an elevator. The door slid open, and the two Earthmen
followed Torlos and his lieutenant into the cubicle. Torlos
pushed a small button. The door slid shut, and a moment
later, Arcot and Morey staggered under the sudden terrific
load as the car shot upward under an acceleration of at
least three gravities!

It continued just long enough for the Earthmen to get
used to it, then it snapped off, and they went flying up toward
the ceiling as it continued upward under its own momentum.
It slowed under the influence of the planet's gravitation
and came to a stop exactly opposite the doorway of a
higher floor.

"Wow! Some elevator!" exclaimed Morey as he stepped
out, flexing his knees as he tried to readjust himself. "That's
what I call a violent way of getting upstairs! It wasn't
designed by a lazy man or a cripple! I prefer to walk, thanks!
What I want to know is how the old people get upstairs. Or
do they die young from using their elevators?"

"No," mused Arcot. "That's the funny thing. They don't
seem to be bothered by the acceleration. They actually
jumped a little off the floor when we started, and didn't
seem to experience much difficulty when we stopped." He
looked thoughtful for a moment. "You know, when Torlos
was bending that crowbar back there in the ship, I picked
up a curious thought—I wonder if—" He turned to the giant
alien. "Torlos, you once gave me the thought-idea 'bone
metal'; what is that?"

Torlos looked at him in surprise and then pointed mutely
to a heavy belt he wore—made of closely woven links of
iron wire!

"I was right, Morey!" Arcot exclaimed. "These men have
iron bones! No wonder he could bend that crowbar! It
would be as easy as it would for you or me to snap a
human arm bone!"

"But, wait a minute!" Morey objected. "How could iron
grow?"

"How can stone grow?" countered Arcot. "That's what
your bones are, essentially—calcium phosphate rock! It's
just a matter of different body chemistry. Their body fluids
are probably alkaline, and iron won't rust in an alkaline
solution." Arcot was talking rapidly as they followed the
aliens down the long corridor.

"The thing that confirms my theory is that elevator.
It's merely an iron cage in a magnetic beam, and it's pulled
up with a terrific acceleration. With iron bones, these men
would be similarly influenced, and they wouldn't notice the
acceleration so much."

Morey grinned. "I'll be willing to bet they don't use cells
in their prisons, here! Just magnetize the floor, and the poor
guy could never get away!"

Arcot nodded. "Of course, the bones must be pure iron;
their bones evidently don't retain any of the magnetism when
they leave the field."

"We seem to be here," Morey interrupted. "Let's continue
the discussion later."

Their party had stopped just outside a large, elaborately
carved door, the first sign of ornamentation the Earthmen
had seen. There were four guards armed with pistols, which,
they discovered later, were powered by compressed air
under terrific pressure. They hurled a small metal slug
through a rifled barrel, and were effective over a distance
of about a mile, although they could only fire four times
without reloading.

Torlos spoke briefly with the guard, who saluted and
opened the door. The two Earthmen followed Torlos into
a large room.

Before them was a large, crescent-shaped table, around
which were seated several men. At the center of the crescent
curve sat a man in a gray uniform, but he was so bedecked
with insignia, medals, ribbons, and decorations that his uniform
was scarcely visible.

The entire assemblage, including the leader, rose as the
Earthmen entered. Arcot and Morey, taking the hint, snapped
to attention and delivered a precise military salute.

"We greet you in the name of our planet," said Arcot aloud.
"I know you don't understand a word I'm saying, but I hope
it sounds impressive enough. We salute you, O High Muckymuck!"

Morey, successfully keeping a straight face, raised his
hand and said sonorously: "That goes double for me, bub."

In his own language, the leader replied, putting his hands
to his hips with a definite motion, and shaking his head
from side to side at the same time.

Arcot watched the man closely while he spoke. He was
taller than Torlos, but less heavily built, as were all the
others here. It seemed that Torlos was unusually powerful,
even for this world.

When the leader had finished, Arcot smiled and turned
to project this thoughts at Torlos.

"Tell your leader that we come from a planet far away
across the vast depths of space. We come in peace, and we
will leave in peace, but we would like to ask some favors of
him, which we will repay by giving him the secret of our
weapons. With them, he can easily conquer Nansal.

"All we want is some wire made from the element lead
and some information from your astronomers."

Torlos turned and spoke to his leader in a deep, powerful
voice.

Meanwhile, Morey was trying to get in communication
with the ship. The walls, however, seemed to be made of
metal, and he couldn't get through to Wade.

"We're cut off from the ship," he said quietly to Arcot.

"I was afraid of that, but I think it'll be all right. Our
proposition is too good for them to turn down."

Torlos turned back to Arcot when the leader had finished
speaking. "The Commanding One asks that you prove the
possibilities of your weapons. His scientists tell him that it
is impossible to make the trip that you claim to have made."

"What your scientists say is true, to an extent," Arcot
thought. "They have learned that no body can go faster
than the speed of light—is that not so?"

"Yes. Such, they say, is the fact. To have made this trip,
you must, of necessity, be not less than twenty million years
old!"

"Tell them that there are some things they do not yet
know about space. The velocity of light is a thing that is
fixed by the nature of space, right?"

Torlos consulted with the scientists again, then turned
back to Arcot. "They agree that they do not know all the
secrets of the Universe, but they agree that the speed of
light is fixed by the nature of space."

"How fast does sound travel?" Arcot asked.

"They ask in what medium do you mean?"

"How fast does light travel? In air? In glass? The speed
of light is as variable as that of sound. If I can alter the
nature of space, so as to make the velocity of light greater,
can I not then go faster than in normal space?"

"They say that this is true," Torlos said, after more conversation
with the men at the table, "but they say that
space is unalterable, since it is emptiness."

"Ask them if they know of the curvature of space." Arcot
was becoming worried for fear his explanation would
be unintelligible; unless they knew his terms, he could not
explain, and it would take a long time to teach them.

"They say," Torlos thought, "that I have misunderstood
you. They say space could not possibly be curved, for space is
emptiness, and how could empty nothingness be curved."

Arcot turned to Morey and shrugged his shoulders. "I
give up, Morey; it's a bad case. If they insist that space is
nothing, and can't be curved, I can't go any further."

"If they don't know of the curvature of space," said Morey,
"ask them how they learned that the velocity of light is the
limiting velocity of a moving body."

Torlos translated and the scientists gave their reply.
"They say that you do not know more of space than they,
for they know that the speed of light is ultimate. They have
tested this with spaceships at high speeds and with experiments
with the smallest particles of electricity."

The scientists were looking at Arcot now in protest; they
felt he was trying to foist something off on them.

Arcot, too, was becoming exasperated. "Well, if they insist
that we couldn't have come from another star, where
do they think I come from? They have explored this system
and found no such people as we, so I must have come from
another star. How? If they won't accept my explanations,
let them think up a theory of their own to explain the
facts!" He paused for Torlos to translate, then went on. "They
say I don't know any more than they do. Tell them to watch
this."

He drew his molecular ray pistol and lifted a heavy
metal chair into the air. Then Morey drew his heat beam
and turned it on the chair. In a few seconds, it was glowing
white hot, and then it collapsed into a fiery ball of
liquid metal. Morey shut off the heat beam, and Arcot held
the ball in the air while it cooled rapidly under the influence
of the molecular ray. Then he lowered it to the floor.

It was obvious that the scientists were impressed, and the
Emperor was talking eagerly with the men around him. They
talked for several minutes, saying nothing to the Earthmen.
Torlos stood quietly, waiting for a message to relay.

The Emperor called out, and some of the guards moved
inside the door.

Torlos turned to Arcot. "Show no emotion!" came his telepathic
warning. "I have been listening to them as they
spoke. The Commanding One wants your weapons. Regardless
of what his scientists tell him about the possibility
of your trip, he knows those weapons work, and he wants
them.

"You see, I am not a Satorian at all. I'm from Nansal, sent
here many years ago as a spy. I have served in their fleets
for many years, and have gained their trust.

"I am telling you the truth, as you will soon see.

"These people are going to follow their usual line of action
and take the most direct way toward their end. They are
going to attack you, believing that you, despite your weapons,
will go down before superior numbers.

"And you'd better move fast; he's calling the guards already!"

Arcot turned to Morey, his face calm, his heart beating
like a vibrohammer. "Keep your face straight, Morey. Don't
look surprised. They're planning to jump us. We'll rip out
the right wall and—"

He stopped. It was too late! The order had been given,
and the guards were leaping toward them. Arcot grabbed
at his ray pistol, but one of the guards jumped him before
he had a chance to draw it.

Torlos seized the man by one leg and an arm and, tensing
his huge muscles, hurled him thirty feet against the Commanding
One with such force that both were killed instantly!
He turned and grabbed another before his first victim
had landed and hurled him toward the advancing guards.
Arcot thought fleetingly that here was proof of Torlos' story
of being from Nansal; the greater gravity of the third planet
made him a great deal stronger than the Satorians!

One of the guards was trying to reach for Arcot. Acting
instinctively, the Earthman lashed out with a hard jab to
the point of the Satorian's jaw. The iron bones transmitted
the shock beautifully to the delicate brain; the man's head
jerked back, and he collapsed to the floor. Arcot's hand felt
as though he'd hit it with a hammer, but he was far too
busy to pay any attention to the pain.

Morey, too, had realized the futility of trying to overcome
the guards by wrestling. The only thing to do was dodge
and punch. The guards were trying to take the Earthmen
alive, but, because of their greater weight, they couldn't
move quite as fast as Arcot and Morey.

Torlos was still in action. He had seen the success of the
Earthmen who, weak as they were, had been able to knock
a man out with a blow to the jaw. Driving his own fists
like pistons, he imitated their blows with deadly results;
every man he struck went down forever.

The dead were piling around him, but through the open
door he could see reinforcements arriving. Somehow, he had
to save these Earthmen; if Sator got their secrets, Nansal
would be lost!

He reached down and grabbed one of the fallen men and
hurled him across the room, smashing back the men who
struggled to attack. Then he picked up another and followed
through with a second projectile. Then a third. With the
speed and tirelessness of some giant engine of war, he
slammed his macabre ammunition against the oncoming reinforcements
with telling results.

At last Arcot was free for a moment, and that was all he
needed. He jerked his molecular ray pistol from its holster
and beamed it mercilessly toward the door, hurling the attackers
violently backwards. They died instantly, their chilled
corpses driving back against their comrades with killing
force.

In a moment, every man in the room was dead except for
the two Earthmen and the giant Torlos.

Outside the room, they could hear shouted orders as more
of the Satorian guards were rallied.

"They'll try to kill us now!" Arcot said. "Come on, we've
got to get out of here!"

"Sure," said Morey, "but which way?"

XVII

"Morey, pull down the wall over that door to block their
passage," Arcot ordered. "I'll get the other wall."

Arcot pointed his pistol and triggered it. The outer wall
flew outward in an explosion of flying masonry. He switched
on his radio and called the Ancient Mariner.

"Wade! We were cut off because of the metal in the walls!
We've been doublecrossed—they tried to jump us. Torlos
warned us in time. We've torn out the wall; just hang outside
with the airlock open and wait for us. Don't use the rays,
because we'll be invisible, and you might hit us."

Suddenly the room rocked under an explosion, and the
debris Morey's ray had torn down over the door was blasted
away. A score of men leaped through the gap before the
dust had settled. Morey beamed them down mercilessly
before they could fire their weapons.

"In the air, quick!" Arcot yelled. He turned on his power
suit and rose into the air, signalling Torlos to grab his ankles
as he had done before. Morey slammed another parting shot
toward the doorway as he lifted himself toward the ceiling.
Then both Earthmen snapped on their invisibility units.
Torlos, because of his direct contact with Arcot, also vanished
from sight.

More of the courageous, but foolhardy Satorians leaped
through the opening and stared in bewilderment as they
saw no one moving. Arcot, Morey, and Torlos were hanging
invisible in the air above them.

Just then, the shining bulk of the Ancient Mariner drifted
into view. They drew back behind the wall and sought
shelter. One of them began to fire his compressed air gun
at it with absolutely no effect; the heavy lux walls might
as well have been hit by a mosquito.

As the airlock swung open, Arcot and Morey headed out
through the breach in the wall. A moment later, they were
inside the ship. The heavy door hissed closed behind them
as they settled to the floor.

"I'll take the controls," Arcot said. "Morey, head for the
rear; you take the moleculars and take Torlos with you to
handle the heat beam." He turned and ran toward the control
room, where Wade and Fuller were waiting. "Wade,
take the forward molecular beams; Fuller, you handle the
heat projector."

Arcot strapped himself into the control chair.

Suddenly, there was a terrific explosion, and the titanic
mass of the ship was rocked by the detonation of a bomb one
of the men in the building had fired at the ship.

Torlos had evidently understood the operation of the
heat beam projector quickly; the stabbing beam reached out,
and the great tower, from floor to roof, suddenly leaned
over and slumped as the entire side of the building was converted
into a mass of glowing stone and molten steel. Then
it crashed heavily to the ground a half mile below.

But already there were forty of the great battleships rising
to meet them.

"I think we'd better get moving," Arcot said. "We can't
let a magnetic ray touch us now; it would kill Torlos. I'm
going to cut in the invisibility units, so don't use the heat
beams whatever you do!"

Arcot snapped the ship into invisibility and darted to one
side. The enemy ships suddenly halted in their wild rush
and looked around in amazement for their opponent.

Arcot was heading for the magnetic force field which surrounded
the city when Torlos made a mistake. He turned
the powerful heat beam downwards and picked off an enemy
battleship. It fell, a blazing wreck, but the ray touched a
building behind it, and the ionized air established a conducting
path between the ship and the planet.

The apparatus was not designed to make a planet invisible,
but it made a noble effort. As a result one of the tubes
blew, and the Ancient Mariner was visible again. Arcot had
no time to replace the tube; the Satorian fleet kept him too
busy.

Arcot drove the ship, shooting, twisting upward; Wade
and Morey kept firing the molecular beams with precision.
The pale rays reached out to touch the battleship, and
wherever they touched, the ships went down in wreckage,
falling to the city below. In spite of the odds against it, the
Ancient Mariner was giving a good account of itself.

And always, Arcot was working the ship toward the magnetic
wall and the base of the city.

Suddenly, giant pneumatic guns from below joined in
the battle, hurling huge explosive shells toward the Earth-ship.
They managed to hit the Ancient Mariner twice, and
each time the ship was staggered by the force of the blast,
but the foot-thick armor of lux metal ignored the explosions.

The magnetic rays touched them a few times, and each
time Torlos was thrown violently to the floor, but the ship
was in the path of the beams for so short a time that he was
not badly injured. He more than made up for his injuries
with the ray he used, and Morey was no mean gunner, either,
judging from the work he was doing.

Three ships attempted to commit suicide in their efforts
to destroy the Earthmen. They were only semi-successful;
they managed to commit suicide. In trying to crash into the
ship, they were simply caught by Morey's or Wade's molecular
beam and thrown away. Morey actually developed a
use for them. He caught them in the beam and used them
as bullets to smash the other ships, throwing them about on
the molecular ray until they were too cold to move.

Arcot finally managed to reach the magnetic wall.

"Wade!" he called. "Get that projector building!"

A molecular beam reached down, and the black metal
dome sailed high into the sky, breaking the solidity of the
magnetic wall. An instant later, the Ancient Mariner shot
through the gap. In a few moments, they would be far away
from the city.

Torlos seemed to realize this. Moving quickly, he pushed
Morey away from the molecular beam projector, taking the
controls away from him.

He did not realize the power of that ray; he did not
know that these projectors could move whole suns out of
their orbits. He only knew that they were destructive. They
were several miles from the city when he turned the projector
on it, after twisting the power control up.

To his amazement, he saw the entire city suddenly leap
into the air and flash out into space, a howling meteor that
vanished into the cloudbank overhead. Behind it was a deep
hole in the planet's surface, a mighty chasm lined with dark
granite.

Torlos stared at it in amazement and horror.

Arcot turned back slowly, and they sailed over the spot
where the city had been. They saw a dozen or so battleships
racing away from them to spread the news of the disaster;
they were the few which had been fortunate enough to
be outside the city when the beam struck.

Arcot maneuvered the ship directly over the mighty pit
and sank slowly down, using the great searchlights to illuminate
the dark chasm. Far, far down, he could see the solid
rock of the bottom. The thing was miles deep.

Then Arcot lifted the ship and headed up through the
cloud layer and into the bright light of the great yellow
sun, above the sea of gray misty clouds.

Arcot signalled Morey, who had come into the control
room, to take over the controls of the ship. "Head out into
space, Morey. I want to find out why Torlos pulled that last
stunt. Wade, will you put a new tube in the invisibility
unit?"

"Sure," Wade replied. "By the way, what happened back
there? We were surprised as the very devil to hear you yelling
for help; everything seemed peaceful up to then."

Arcot flexed his bruised hands and grinned ruefully.
"Plenty happened." He went on to explain to Wade and Fuller
what had happened in their meeting with the Satorian
Commander.

"Nice bunch of people to deal with," Wade said caustically.
"They tried to get everything and lost it all. We would
have given them plenty if they'd been decent about it. But
what sort of war is this that the people of these two planets
are carrying on, anyway?"

"That's the question I intend to settle," replied Arcot.
"We haven't had an opportunity to talk to Torlos yet. He
had just admitted to me that he was a spy for Nansal when
the fun began, and we've been too busy to ask questions
ever since. Come on, let's go into the library."

Arcot indicated to Torlos that he was to go with him.
Wade and Fuller followed.

When they had all seated themselves, Arcot began the
telepathic questioning. "Torlos, why did you force Morey
to leave the ray and then destroy the city? You certainly had
no reason to kill all the non-combatant women and children
in that city, did you? And why, after I told you absolutely
not to use the heat beam while we were invisible, did
you use the rays on that battleship? You made our invisibility
break down and destroyed a tube. Why did you do this?"

"I am sorry, man of Earth," replied Torlos. "I can only
say that I did not fully understand the effect the rays would
have. I did not know how long we would remain invisible;
the thing has been accomplished in our laboratories, but
only for fractions of a second, and I feared we might become
visible soon. That was one of their latest battleships,
equipped with a new, secret, and very deadly weapon. I
do not know exactly what the weapon is, but I knew that
ship could be deadly against us, and I wanted to make sure
we were not attacked by it. That is why I used the beam
while your ship was invisible.

"And I did not intend to destroy the city. I was only
trying to tear up the factory that builds these battleships; I
only wanted to destroy their machines. I had no conception
of the power of that ray. I was as horrified to see the city
disappear as you were; I only wanted to protect my people."
Torlos smiled bitterly. "I have lived among these treacherous
people for many years, and I cannot say that I had no provocation
to destroy their city and everyone in it. But I had
no intention of doing it, Earthman."

Arcot knew he was sincere. There could be no deception
when communicating telepathically. He wished he had
used it when communicating with the Commanding One of
Sator; the trouble would have been stopped quickly!

"You still do not have any conception of the magnitude
of the power of that beam, Torlos," Arcot told him. "With
the rays of this ship, we tore a sun from its orbit and threw
it into another. What you did to that city, we could do to
the whole planet. Do not tamper with forces you do not
understand, Torlos.

"There are forces on this ship that would make the
energies of your greatest battleship seem weak and futile.
We can race through space a billion times faster than the
speed of light; we can tear apart and destroy the atoms of
matter; we can rip apart the greatest of planets; we can
turn the hurtling stars and send them where we want them;
we can curve space as we please; we can put out the fires of
a sun, if we wish.

"Torlos, respect the powers of this ship, and do not release
its energies unknowingly; they are too great."

Torlos looked around him in awe. He had seen the engines—small,
apparently futile things, compared with the
solid might of the giant engines in his ship—but he had
seen explosive charges that he knew would split any ship
open from end to end bounce harmlessly from the smooth
walls of this ship. He had seen it destroy the fleet of magnetic
ships that had formed a supposedly impregnable guard
around the mightiest city of Sator.

Then he himself had touched a button, and the giant
city had shot off into space, leaving behind it only a screaming
tornado and a vast chasm in the crust of the blasted
planet.

He could not appreciate the full significance of the velocities
Arcot had told him about—he only knew that he had
made a bad mistake in underrating the powers of this ship!
"I will not touch these things again without your permission,
Earthman," Torlos promised earnestly.

The Ancient Mariner drove on through space, rapidly
eating up the millions of miles that separated Nansal from
Sator. Arcot sat in the control room with Morey discussing
their passenger.

"You know," Arcot mused, "I've been thinking about that
man's strength; an iron skeleton doesn't explain it all. He
has to have muscles to move that skeleton around."

"He's got muscles, all right," Morey grinned. "But I see
what you mean; muscles that big should tire easily, and his
don't seem to. He seems tireless; I watched him throw those
men one after another like bullets from a machine gun.
He threw the last one as violently as the first—and those men
weighed over three hundred pounds! Apparently his muscles
felt no fatigue!"

"There's another thing," pointed out Arcot. "The way he
was breathing and the way he seemed to keep so cool.
When I got through there, I was dripping with sweat; that
hot, moist air was almost too much for me. Our friend?
Cool as ever, if not more so.

"And after the fight, he wasn't even breathing heavily!"

"No," agreed Morey. "But did you notice him during
the fight? He was breathing heavily, deeply, and swiftly—not
the shallow, panting breath of a runner, but deep and
full, yet faster than I can breathe. I could hear him breathing
in spite of all the noise of the battle."

"I noticed it," Arcot said. "He started breathing before
the fight started. A human being can fight very swiftly, and
with tremendous vigor, for ten seconds, putting forth his
best effort, and only breathe once or twice. For another
two minutes, he breathes more heavily than usual. But after
that, he can't just slow down back to normal. He has used
up the surplus oxygen in his system, and that has to be replaced;
he has run into 'oxygen debt'. He has to keep on
breathing hard to get back the oxygen surplus his body
requires.

"But not Torlos! No fatigue for him! Why? Because he
doesn't use the oxygen of the air to do work, and therefore
his body is not a chemical engine!"

Morey nodded slowly. "I see what you're driving at. His
body uses the heat energy of the air! His muscles turn heat
energy into motion the same way our molecular beams do!"

"Exactly—he lives on heat!" Arcot said. "I've noticed that
he seems almost cold-blooded; his body is at the temperature
of the room at all times. In a sense, he is reptilian, but
he's vastly more efficient and greatly different than any reptile
Earth ever knew. He eats food, all right, but he only
needs it to replace his body cells and to fuel his brain."

"Oh, brother," said Morey softly. "No wonder he can
do the things he did! Why, he could have kept up that fight
for hours without getting tired! Fatigue is as unknown to
him as cold weather. He'd only need sleep to replace worn
parts. His world is warm and upright on its axis, so there
are no seasons. He couldn't survive in the Arctic, but he's
obviously the ideal form of life for the tropics."

As the two men found out later, Morey was wrong on
that last point. The men of Torlos' race had a small organ, a
mass of cells in the lower abdomen which could absorb food
from the bloodstream and oxidize it, yielding heat, whenever
the temperature of the blood dropped below a certain
point. Then they could live very comfortably in the Arctic
zones; they carried their own heaters. Their vast strength
was limited then, however, and they were forced to eat
more and were more subject to fatigue.

Wade and Fuller had been trying to speak with Torlos
telepathically, and had evidently run into difficulty, for Fuller
called into the control room: "Hey, Arcot, come here a
minute! I thought telepathy was a universal language, but
this guy doesn't get our ideas at all! And we can't make out
some of his. Just now, he seemed to be thinking of 'nourishment'
or 'food', and I found out he was thinking of 'heat'!"

"I'll be right down," Arcot told him, heading for the
library.

As he entered, Torlos smiled at him; Arcot picked up his
thought easily: "Your friends do not seem to understand
my thoughts."

"We are not made as you are," Arcot explained, "and
our thought forms are different. To you, 'heat' and 'food'
are practically the same thing, but we do not think of them
as such."

He continued, explaining carefully to Torlos the differences
between their bodies and their methods of using energy.

"Stone bones!" Torlos thought in amazement. "And chemical
engines for muscles! No wonder you seem so weak. And
yet, with your brains, I would hate to have to fight a war
with your people!"

"Which brings me to another point," Arcot continued. "We
would like to know how the war between the people of
Sator and the people of Nansal began. Has it been going on
very long?"

Torlos nodded. "I will tell you the story. It is a history
that began many centuries ago; a history of persecution and
rebellion. And yet, for all that, I think it an interesting history.

"Hundreds of years ago, on Nansal ..."

XVIII

Hundreds of years ago, on Nansal, there had lived a wise
and brilliant teacher named Norus. He had developed an
ideal, a philosophy of life, a code of ethics. He had taught
the principles of nobility without arrogance, pride without
stubbornness, and humility without servility.

About him had gathered a group of men who began to
develop and spread his ideals. As the new philosophy spread
across the planet, more and more Nansalians adopted it and
began to raise their children according to its tenets.

But no philosophy, however workable, however noble,
can hope to convert everyone. There always remains a hard
core of men who feel that "the old way is the best way".
In this case, it was the men whose lives had been based on
cunning, deceit, and treachery.

One of these men, a brilliant, but warped genius, named
Sator, had built the first spaceship, and he and his men had
fled Nansal to set up their own government and free themselves
from the persecution they believed they suffered at
the hands of the believers of Norus.

They fled to the second planet, where the ship crashed
and the builder, Sator, was killed. For hundreds of years,
nothing was heard of the emigrants, and the people of Nansal
believed them dead. Nansal was at peace.

But the Satorians managed to live on the alien world,
and they built a civilization there, a civilization based on
an entirely different system. It was a system of cunning.
To them, cunning was right. The man who could plot most
cunningly, gain his ends by deceiving his friends best, was
the man who most deserved to live. There were a few restrictions;
they had loyalty, for one thing—loyalty to their
country and their world.

In time, the Satorians rediscovered the space drive, but
by this time, living on the new planet had changed them
physically. They were somewhat smaller than the Nansalians,
and lighter in color, for their world was always sunless.
The warm rays of the sun had tanned the skins of the
Nansalians to a darker color.

When the Satorians first came to Nansal, it was presumably
in peace. After so many hundreds of years without
war, the Nansalians accepted them, and trade treaties
were signed. For years, the Satorians traded peacefully.

In the meantime, Satorian spies were working to find the
strengths and weaknesses of Nansal, searching to discover
their secret weapons and processes, if any. And they rigorously
guarded their own secrets. They refused to disclose
the secrets of the magnetic beam and the magnetic space
drive.

Finally, there were a few of the more suspicious Nansalians
who realized the danger in such a situation. There
were three men, students in one of the great scientific schools
of Nansal, who realized that the situation should be studied.
There was no law prohibiting the men of Nansal from going
to Sator, but it seemed that Nature had raised a more impenetrable
barrier.

All Nansalians who went to Sator died of a mysterious
disease. A method was found whereby a man's body could
be sterilized, bacteriologically speaking, so he could not
spread the disease, and this was used on all Satorians entering
Nansal. But you can't sterilize a whole planet. Nansalians
could not go to Sator.

But these three men had a different idea. They carefully
studied the speech and the mannerisms and customs of
the Satorians. They learned to imitate the slang and idioms.
They went even further; they picked three Satorian spaceship
navigators and studied them minutely every time they
got a chance, in order to learn their habits and their speech
patterns. The three Satorians were exceptionally large men,
almost perfect doubles of the three Nansalians—and, one by
one, the Nansalians replaced them.

They had bleached their faces, and surgeons, working
from photographs, changed their features so that the three
Nansalians were exact doubles of the three astrogators. Then
they acted. On three trips, one of the men that went back
as navigator was a Nansalian.

It was six years before they returned to Nansal, but
when they finally did, they had learned two things.

In the first place, the 'disease' which had killed Nansalians
who had come in contact with Satorians on Nansal was
nothing but a poison which acted on contact with the skin.
The Nansalians who had gone to Sator had simply been
murdered. There was no disease; it had simply been a Satorian
plot to keep Nansalians from going to Sator.

The second thing they had learned was the secret of the
Satorian magnetic space drive.

It was common knowledge on Sator that their commander
would soon lead them across space to conquer Nansal and
settle on a world of clear air and cloudless skies, where they
could see the stars of space at night. They were waiting
only until they could build up a larger fleet and learned
all they could from the Nansalians.

They attacked three years after the three Nansalian spies
returned with their information.

During those three years, Nansal had secretly succeeded
in building up a fleet of the magnetic ships, but it went
down quickly before the vastly greater fleet of the Satorians.
Their magnetic rays were deadly, killing everyone they struck.
They could lift the iron-boned Nansalians high into the air,
then drop them hundreds of feet to their death.

The buildings, with their steel and iron frames, went
down, crushing hundreds of others. They practically depopulated
the whole planet.

But the warnings of the three spies had been in time.
They had enlarged some of the great natural caverns and
dug others out of solid rock. Here they had built laboratories,
factories, and dwelling places far underground, where
the Satorians could never find them.

Enough men reached the caverns before the disaster struck
to carry on. They had been chosen from the strongest,
healthiest, and most intelligent that Nansal had. They
lived there for over a century, while the planet was overrun
by the conquerors and the cities were rebuilt by the
Satorians.

During this century, the magnetic ray shield was developed
by the hidden Nansalians. Daring at last to face
their conquerors, they built a city on the surface and protected
it with the magnetic force screen.

By the time the Satorians found the city, it was too late.
A battle fleet was mobilized and rushed to the spot, but
the city was impregnable. The great domed power stations
were already in operation, and they were made of nonmagnetic
materials, so they could not be pulled from the ground.
The magnetic beams were neutralized by the shield, and no
ship could pass through it without killing every man aboard.

That first city was a giant munitions plant. The Nansalians
built factories there and laughed while the armies of
Sator raged impotently at the magnetic barrier. They tried
sending missiles through, but the induction heating in every
metal part of the bombs either caused them to explode
instantly or to drop harmlessly and burn.

In the meantime, the men of Nansal were building their
fleet. The Satorians stepped up production, too, but the
Nansalians had developed a method of projecting the magnetic
screen. Any approaching Satorian ship had its magnetic
support cut from under it, and it crashed to the ground.

It took nearly thirty years of hard work and harder
fighting for the Nansalians to convince the people of Sator
that Nansal and the philosophy of Norus had not only not
been wiped out, but was capable of wiping out the Satorians.

With their screened and protected fleet, the followers of
Norus smashed the Satorian cities, and drove their enemy
back to Sator.

There were only three enemy cities left on Nansal when,
somehow, they managed to learn the secret of the magnetic
screen.

By this time, the forces of Nansal had increased tremendously,
and they developed the next surprise for the Satorians.
One after another, the three remaining cities were
destroyed by a barrage of poison gas.

The fleet of Sator tried to retaliate, but the Nansalians
were prepared for them. Every building had been sealed
and filters had been built into the air conditioning systems.

Shortly, the men of Nansal were again in control of their
planet, and the fleet stood guard over the planet.

The Satorians, beaten technologically, were still not ready
to give up. Falling back on their peculiar philosophy of
life, they pulled a trick the Nansalians would never have
thought of. They sued for peace.

The government of Nansal was willing; they had had
enough of bloodshed. They permitted a delegation to arrive.
The ship was escorted into the city and the parleying
began.

The Satorian delegation asked for absolutely unreasonable
terms. They demanded fleet bases on Nansal; they demanded
an unreasonable rate of exchange between the two powers,
one which would be highly favorable to Sator; they wanted
to impose fantastic restrictions on Nansalian travel and none
whatsoever on their own.

Month followed month and months became years as the
diplomats of Nansal tried, patiently and logically, to show
the Satorians how unreasonable their demands were.

Not once did they suspect that the Satorians had no intention
of trying to get the conditions they asked for. Their
sole purpose was to drag the parleying on and on, bickering,
quarreling, demanding, and conceding just enough to give
the Nansalians hope that a treaty might eventually be consummated.

And during all that time, the factories of Sator were working
furiously to build the greatest fleet that had ever crossed
the space between the two planets!

When they were ready to attack, the Satorian delegation
told Nansal frankly that they would not treaty with them.
The day the delegation left, the Satorian fleet swept down
upon Nansal!

The Nansalians were again beaten back into their cities,
safe behind their magnetic screens, but unable to attack. But
the forces of Sator had not won easily—they had, in fact,
not won at all. Their supply line was too long and their fleet
had suffered greatly at the hands of the defenders of
Nansal.

For a long while, the balance of power was so nearly
equal that neither side dared attack.

Then the balance again swung toward Nansal. A Nansalian
scientist discovered a compact method of storing
power. Oddly enough, it was similar to the method Dr.
Richard Arcot had discovered a hundred thousand light
centuries away! It did not store nearly the power, and was
inefficient, but it was a great improvement over their older
method of generating energy in the ship itself.

The Nansalian ships could be made smaller, and lighter,
and more maneuverable, and at the same time could be
equipped with heavier, more powerful magnetic beam generators.

Very shortly, the Satorians were again at the mercy of
Nansal. They could not fight the faster, more powerful ships
of the Nansalians, and again they went down in defeat.

And again they sued for peace.

This time, Nansal knew better; they went right on developing
their fleet while the diplomats of Sator argued.

But the Satorians weren't fools; they didn't expect Nansal
to swallow the same bait a second time. Sator had another
ace up her sleeve.

Ten days after they arrived, every diplomat and courier of
the Satorian delegation committed suicide!

Puzzled, the government of Nansal reported the deaths
to Sator at once, expecting an immediate renewal of hostilities;
they were quite sure that Sator assumed they had been
murdered. Nansal was totally unprepared for what happened;
Sator acknowledged the message with respects and
said they would send a new commission.

Two days later, Nansal realized it had been tricked again.
A horrible disease broke out and spread like wildfire. The
incubation period was twelve days; during that time it
gave no sign. Then the flesh began to rot away, and the victim
died within hours. No wonder the ambassadors had
committed suicide!

Millions died, including Torlos' own father, during the
raging epidemic that followed. But, purely by lucky accident,
the Nansalian medical research teams came up with
a cure and a preventive inoculation before the disease had
spread over the whole planet.

Sator's delegation had inoculated themselves with the disease
and, at the sacrifice of their own lives, had spread it
on Nansal. Although the Satorians had developed the horribly
virulent strain of virus, they had not found a cure; the
diplomats knew they were going to die.

Having managed to stop the disease before it swept the
planet, the Nansalians decided to pull a trick of their own.
Radio communication with Sator was cut off in such a way
as to lead the Satorian government to believe that Nansal
was dying of the disease.

The scientists of Sator knew that the virus was virulent;
in fact, too virulent for its own good. It killed the host every
time, and the virus could not live outside a living cell. They
knew that shortly after every Nansalian died, the virus,
too, would be dead.

Their fleet started for Nansal six months after radio
contact had broken off. Expecting to find Nansal a dead
planet, they were totally unprepared to find them alive and
ready for the attack. The Satorian fleet, vastly surprised to
find a living, vigorous enemy, was totally wiped out.

Since that time, both planets had remained in a state of
armed truce. Neither had developed any weapon which
would enable them to gain an advantage over their enemy.
Each was so spy-infested that no move could pass undiscovered.

Stalemate.

XIX

Torlos spread his hands eloquently. "That is the history
of our war. Can you wonder that my people were suspicious
when your ship appeared? Can you wonder that they
drove you away? They were afraid of the men of Sator;
when they saw your weapons, they were afraid for their
civilization.

"On the other hand, why should the men of Sator fear?
They knew that our code of honor would not permit us
to make a treacherous attack.

"I regret that my people drove you away, but can you
blame them?"

Arcot had to admit that he could not. He turned to
Morey. "They were certainly reasonable in driving us from
their cities; experience has taught them that it's the safest
way. A good offense is always the best defense.

"But experience has taught me that, unlike Torlos, I have
to eat. I wonder if it might not be a good idea to get a
little rest too—I'm bushed."

"Good idea," agreed Morey. "I'll ask Wade to stand guard
while we sleep. If Torlos wants company, he can talk to
Wade as well as anyone. I'm due for some sleep myself."

Arcot, Morey, and Fuller went to their rooms for some
rest. Arcot and Morey were tired, but after an hour, Fuller
rose and went down to the control room where Wade was
communicating telepathically with Torlos.

"Hello," Wade greeted him. "I thought you were going
to join the Snoring Chorus."

"I tried to, but I couldn't get in tune. What have you
been doing?"

"I've been talking with Torlos—and with fair success.
I'm getting the trick of thought communication," Wade said
enthusiastically. "I asked Torlos if he wanted to sleep, and
it seems that they do it regularly, one day in ten. And when
they sleep, they sleep soundly. It's more of a coma, something
like the hibernation of a bear or a possum.

"If you want to do business with Mr. John Doe, and
he happens to be asleep, your business will have to wait. It
takes something really drastic to wake these people up.

"I remember a remark one of my classmates made while
I was going to college. He was totally unconscious of the
humor in the thing. He said: 'I've got to go to more lectures.
I've been losing a lot of sleep.'

"He intended them to be totally disconnected thoughts,
but the rest of us knew his habits, and we almost knocked
ourselves out laughing.

"I was just wondering what would happen if a Nansalian
were to drop off in class. They'd probably have to
call an ambulance or something to carry him home!"

Fuller looked at the giant. "I doubt it. One of his classmates
would just tuck him under his arm and take him on
home—or to the next lecture. Remember, they only weigh
about four hundred pounds on Nansal, which is no more to
them than fifty pounds is to us."

"True enough," Wade agreed. "But you know, I'd hate
to have him wrap those arms of his about me. He might
get excited, or sneeze or something, and—squish!"

"You and your morbid imagination." Fuller sat down in
one of the seats. "Let's see if we can't get a three-way conversation
going; this guy is interesting."

Arcot and Morey awoke nearly three hours later, and
the Earthmen ate their breakfast, much to Torlos' surprise.

"I can understand that you need far more food than we
do," he commented, "but you only ate a few hours ago. It
seems like a tremendous amount of food to me. How could
you possibly grow enough in your cities?"

"So that's why they don't have any farms!" Fuller said.

"Our food is grown out on the plains outside the cities,
where there is room," Arcot explained. "It's difficult, but we
have machines to help us. We could never have developed
the cone type of city you have, however, for we need huge
huge quantities of food. If we were to seal ourselves inside
our cities as your people have to protect themselves from
enemies, we would starve to death very quickly."

"You know," Morey said, "I'll have to admit that Torlos'
people are a higher type of creation than we are. Man,
and all other animals on Earth, are parasites of the plant
world. We're absolutely incapable of producing our own
foods. We can't gather energy for ourselves. We're utterly
dependent on plants.

"But these men aren't—at least not so much so. They
at least generate their own muscular energy by extracting
heat from the air they breathe. They combine all the best
features of plants, reptiles, and mammals. I don't know
where they'd be classified biologically!"

After the meal, they went to the control room and
strapped themselves into the control seats. Arcot checked
the fuel gauge.

"We have plenty of lead left," he said to Morey, "and
Torlos has assured me that we will be able to get more on
Nansal. I suggest we show him how the space control
works, so that he can tell the Nansalian scientists about it
from personal experience.

"In this sun's gravitational field, we'll lose a lot of power,
but as long as it can be replaced, we're all right."

Turning to the Nansalian, Arcot pointed out towards
the little spark of light that was Torlos' home planet. "Keep
your eyes on that, Torlos. Watch it grow when we use our
space control drive."

Arcot pushed the little red switch to the first notch. The
air around them pulsed with power for an instant, then
space had readjusted itself.

The point that was Nansal grew to a disc, and then it
was swiftly leaping toward them, welling up to meet them,
expanding its bulk with awesome speed. Torlos watched it
tensely.

There was a sudden splintering crash, and Arcot jerked
open the circuit in alarm. They were almost motionless again
as the stars reeled about them.

Torlos had been nervous. Like any man so effected, he
had unconsciously tightened his muscles. His fingers had
sunk into the hard plastic of the arm rest on his chair, and
crushed it as though it had been put between the jaws of
a hydraulic press!

"I'm glad we weren't holding hands," said Wade, eyeing
the broken plastic.

"I am very sorry," Torlos thought humbly. "I did not intend
to do that. I forgot myself when I saw that planet
rushing at me so fast." His chagrin was apparent on his
face.

Arcot laughed. "It is nothing, Torlos. We are merely astonished
at the terrific strength of your hand. Wade wasn't
worried; he was joking!"

Torlos looked relieved, but he looked at the splintered
arm rest and then at his hand. "It is best that I keep my
too-strong hands away from your instruments."

The ship was falling toward Nansal at a relatively slow
rate, less than four miles a second. Arcot accelerated toward
the planet for two hours, then began to decelerate. Five
hundred miles above the planet's surface, their velocity
cut the ship into a descending spiral orbit to allow the
atmosphere to check their speed.

The outer lux hull began to heat up, and he closed the
relux screens to cut down the radiation from it. When he
opened them again, the ship was speeding over the broad
plains of the planet.

Torlos told Arcot that by far the greater percentage of
the surface of Nansal was land. There was still plenty of
water, for their seas were much deeper than those of Earth.
Some of the seas were thirty miles deep over broad areas—hundreds
of square miles. As if to compensate, the land
surfaces were covered with titanic mountain ranges, some
of them over ten miles above sea level.

Torlos, his eyes shining, directed the Earthmen to his
home city, the capital of the world-nation.

"Is there no traffic between the cities here, Torlos?" Morey
asked. "We haven't seen any ships."

"There's continuous traffic," Torlos replied, "but you have
come in far to the north, well away from the regularly
scheduled routes. The commerce must be densely populated
with warships as well, and both warships and commercial
craft are made to look as much alike as possible so that the
enemy can not know when ships of war are present and
when they are not, and their attacks are more easily beaten
off. They are forced to live off our commerce while they are
here. Before we invented the magnetic storage device, they
were forced to get fuel from our ships in order to make the
return journey; they could not carry enough for the round
trip."

Suddenly his smile broadened, and he pointed out the
forward window. "Our city is behind that next range of
mountains!"

They were flying at a height of twenty miles, and the
range Torlos indicated was far off in the blue distance, almost
below the horizon. As they approached them, the mountains
seemed to change slowly as their perspective shifted.
They seemed to crawl about on one another like living things,
growing larger and changing from blue to blue-green, and
then to a rich, verdant emerald.

Soon the ship was rocketing smoothly over them. Ahead
and below, in the rocky gorge of the mountains, lay a great
cone city, the largest the Earthmen had yet seen. As they
approached, they could see another cone behind it—the
city was a double cone! They resembled the circus tents
of two centuries earlier, connected by a ridge.

"Ah—home!" smiled Torlos. "See—that twin cone idea
is new. It was not thus when I left it, years ago. It is growing,
growing—and in that new section! See? They have bright
colors on all the buildings! And already they are digging
foundations out to the left for a third cone!" He was so excited
that it was difficult for Arcot to read his thoughts
coherently.

"But we won't have to build more fortifications," Torlos
continued, "if you will give us the secret of the rays you
use!

"But, Arcot, you must hide in the hills now; drop down
and deposit me in the hills. I will walk to the city on foot.

"I will be able to identify myself, and I will soon be inside
the city, telling the Supreme Three that I have salvation
and peace for them!"

"I have a better idea," Arcot told him. "It will save you
a long walk. We'll make the ship invisible, and take you
close to the city. You can drop, say ten feet from the ship
to the ground, and continue from there. Will that be all
right?"

Torlos agreed that it would.

Invisible, the Ancient Mariner dove down toward the
city, stopping only a few hundred feet from the base of
the magnetic wall, near one of the gigantic beam stations.

"I will come out in a one-man flier, slowly, and at low
altitude, toward that mountain there," Torlos told Arcot,
pointing. "Then you may become visible and follow me into
the city.

"You need fear no treachery from my people," he assured
them. Then, smiling: "As if you need fear treachery from
the hands of any people! You have certainly proven your
ability to defend yourselves!

"Even if my people were treacherously inclined, they
would certainly have been convinced by your escape from
the Satorians. And they have undoubtedly heard all about
it by now through the secret radios of our spies. After all,
I was not the only Nansalian spy there, and some of the
others must surely have escaped in the ships that ran away
after I destroyed the city." Arcot could feel the sadness in
his mind as he thought of the fact that his inadvertent destruction
of the city had undoubtedly killed some of his own
people.

Torlos paused a moment, then asked: "Is there any
message you wish me to give the Supreme Council of Three?"

"Yes," replied Arcot. "Repeat to them the offer we so
foolishly made to the Commanding One of Sator. We will
give them the molecular ray which tore the city out of the
ground, and, as your people have seen, also tore a mountain
down. We will give them our heat beam, which will melt
anything except the material of which this ship is made. And
we will give them the knowledge to make this material, too.

"Best of all, we will give them the secret of the most
terrific energy source known to mankind; the energy of matter
itself. With these in your hands, Sator will soon be peaceful.

"In return, we ask only two things. They will cost you almost
nothing, but they are invaluable to us. We have lost
our way. In the vastness of space, we can no longer locate
our own galaxy. But our own Island Universe has features
which could be distinguished on an astronomical plate, and
we have taken photographs of it which your astronomers
can compare with their own to help us find our way back.

"In addition, we need more fuel—lead wire. Our space
control drive does not use up energy except in the presence
of a strong gravitational field; most of it is drained back
into our storage coils, with very little loss. But we have
used it several times near a large sun, and the power drainage
goes up exponentially. We would not have enough to
get back home if we happened to run into any more trouble
on the way."

Arcot paused a moment, considering. "Those two things
are all we really need, but we would like to take back more,
if your Council is willing. We would like samples of your
books and photographs and other artifacts of your civilization
to take back home to our own people.

"That, and peace, are all we ask."

Torlos nodded. "The things you ask, I am sure the Council
will readily agree to. It seems little enough payment for the
things you intend to do for us."

"Very well, then. We will wait for you. Good luck!"

Torlos turned and jumped out of the airlock. The ship
rose high above him as he suddenly became visible on the
plain below. He was running toward the city in great leaps
of twenty feet—graceful, easy leaps that showed his tremendous
power.

Suddenly, a ship was darting down from the city toward
him. As it curved down, Torlos stopped and made certain
signals with his arms, then he stood quietly with his hands
in the air.

The ship hovered above him, and two men dropped
thirty feet to the ground and questioned him for several
minutes.

Finally, they motioned to the ship, which dropped to
ten feet, and the three men leaped lightly to its door and
entered. The door snapped shut, and the ship shot toward
the city. The magnetic wall opened for a moment, and the
ship shot through. Within seconds, if was out of sight, lost
in the busy air traffic above the city.

"Well," said Arcot, "now we go back to the hills and
wait."

XX

For two days, the Ancient Mariner lay hidden in the hills.
It was visible all that time, but at least two of the men were
watching the sky every hour of the day. Torlos himself
was, they knew, perfectly trustworthy, but they did not
know whether his people were as honorable as he claimed
them to be.

Arcot and Wade were in the control room on the afternoon
of the second day—not Earth days, but the forty-hour
Nansalian days—and they had been quietly discussing the
biological differences between themselves and the inhabitants
of this planet.

Suddenly, Wade saw a slowly moving speck in the sky.

"Look, Arcot! There's Torlos!"

They waited, ready for any hostile action as the tiny ship
approached rapidly, circling slowly downward as it came
nearer. It landed a few hundred feet away, and Torlos
emerged, running rapidly toward the Earth ship. Arcot let
him in through the airlock.

Torlos smiled broadly. "I had difficulty in convincing the
Council that my story was true. When I told them that
you could go faster than light, they strongly objected. But
they had to admit that you had certainly been able to
tear down the mountain very effectively, and they had
received reports of the destruction of the Satorian capitol.

"It seems you first visited the city of Thanso when you
came here. The people were nearly panic-stricken when they
saw you rip that mountain down and uproot the magnetic
ray station. No one ship had ever done that before!

"But the fact that several guards had seen me materialize
out of thin air, plus the fact that they knew you could make
yourselves invisible, convinced them that my story was true.

"They want to talk to you, and they say that they will
gladly grant your requests. But you must promise them one
thing—you must stay away from any of our people, for
they are afraid of disease. Bacteria that do not bother you
very much might be deadly to us. The Supreme Council of
Three is willing to take the risk, but they will not allow
anyone else to be exposed."

"We will keep apart from your people if the Council
wishes," Arcot agreed, "but there is no real danger. We
are so vastly different from you that it will be impossible for
you to get our diseases, or for us to contract yours. However,
if the Council wants it, we will do as they ask."

Torlos at once went back to his ship and headed toward
the city.

Arcot followed in the Ancient Mariner, keeping about
three hundred feet to the rear.

When they reached the magnetic screen of the city, one
of the beam stations cut its power for a few moments, leaving
a gap for the two ships to glide smoothly through.

On the roofs of the buildings, men and women were
collected, watching the shining, polished hull of the strange
ship as it moved silently above them.

Torlos led them to the great central building and dropped
to the huge landing field beside it. All around them, in
regular rows, the great hulls of the Nansal battleships were
arranged. Arcot landed the Ancient Mariner and shut off
the power.

"I think Wade is the man to go with me this time,"
Arcot said. "He has learned to communicate with Torlos
quite well. We will each carry both pistols and wear our
power suits. And we'll be in radio communication with you
at all times.

"I don't think they'll start anything we don't like this
time, but I'm not as confident as I was, and I'm not going
to take any useless chances. This time I'm going to make
arrangements. If I die here, there's going to be a very costly
funeral, and these men are going to pay the costs!

"I'll call you every three minutes, Morey. If I don't, check
up on me. If you still don't get an answer, take this place
apart because you won't be able to hurt us then.

"I'm going to tell Torlos about our precautions. If the building
shields the radio, I'll be listening for you and I'll retrace
my steps until I can contact you again. Right? Then
come on, Wade!" Arcot, fully equipped, strode down the corridor
to the airlock.

Torlos was waiting for them with another man, whom Torlos
explained was a high-ranking officer of the fleet. Torlos,
it seemed, was without official rank. He was a secret service
agent without official status, and therefore an officer had
been assigned to accompany the Earthmen.

Torlos seemed to be relaxing in the soft, warm sunlight
of his native world. It had been years since he had seen
that yellow sun except from the windows of a space flier.
Now he could walk around in the clear air of the planet of
his birth.

Arcot explained to him the precautions they had taken
against trouble here, and Torlos smiled. "You have certainly
learned greater caution. I can't blame you. We certainly
seem little different from the men of Sator; we can only stand
on trial. But I know you will be safe."

They walked across the great court, which was covered
with a soft, springy turf of green. The hot sun shining down
on them, the brilliant colors of the buildings, the towering
walls of the magnificent edifice they were approaching, and,
behind them, the shining hull of the Ancient Mariner set
among the dark, needle-shaped Nansalian ships, all combined
to make a picture that would remain in their minds
for a long time.

Here, there were no guards watching them as they were
conducted to the meeting of the Supreme Council of Three.

They went into the main entrance of the towering government
building and stepped into the great hall on the
ground floor. It was like the interior of an ancient Gothic
cathedral, beautiful and dignified. Great pillars of green stone
rose in graceful, fluted columns, smoothly curving out like
the branches of some stylized tree to meet in arches that
rose high in pleasing curves to a point midway between four
pillars. The walls were made of a dark green stone as a
background; on them had been traced designs in colored
tile.

The whole hall was a thing of colored beauty; the color
gave it life, as the yellow sunlight gave life to the trees of
the mountains.

They crossed the great hall and came at last to the elevator.
Its door was made of narrow strips of metal, so bound
together that the whole made a flexible, but strong sheet.
In principle, the doors worked like the cover of an antique
roll-top desk. The idea was old, but these men had made
their elevator doors very attractive by the addition of color.
In no way did they detract from the dignified grace of the
magnificent hall.

Torlos turned to Arcot. "I wonder if it would not be
wise to shut off your radio as we enter the elevator. Might
not the magnetic force affect it?"

"Probably," Arcot agreed. He contacted Morey and told
him that the radio would be cut off for a short while. "But
it won't be more than three minutes," Arcot finished. "If
it is—you know what to do."

As they entered the elevator, Torlos smiled at the two
Earthmen. "We will ascend more gradually this time, so that
the acceleration won't be so tiring to you." He moved the
controls carefully, and by gentle steps they rose to the
sixty-third floor of the giant building.

As they stepped out of the elevator, Torlos pointed toward
an open window that stretched widely across one wall. Below
them, they could see the Ancient Mariner.

"Your radio contact should be good," Torlos commented.

Wade put in a call to Morey, and to his relief, he made
contact immediately.

The officer was leading them down a green stone corridor
toward a simple door. He opened it, and they entered
the room beyond.

In the center of the room was a large triangular table.
At a place at the center of each side sat one man on a
slightly raised chair, while on each side of him sat a number
of other men.

Torlos stopped at the door and saluted. Then he spoke
in rapid, liquid syllables to the men sitting at the table,
halting once or twice and showing evident embarrassment
as he did so.

He paused, and one of the three men in command replied
rapidly in a pleasant voice that had none of the harsh
command that Arcot had noticed in the voice of the Satorian
Commanding One. Arcot liked the voice and the man.

Judging by Earth standards, he was past middle age—whatever
that might be on Nansal—with crisp black hair
that was bleaching slightly. His face showed the signs of
worry that the making of momentous decisions always leaves,
but although the face was strong with authority, there was
a gentleness that comes with a feeling of kindly power.

Wade was talking rapidly into the radio, describing the
scene before them to Morey. He described the great table
of dark wood, and the men about it, some in the blue uniform
of the military, and some in the loose, soft garments
of the civilian. Their colored fabrics, individually in good
taste and harmony, were frequently badly out of harmony
with the costume of a neighbor, a difficulty accompanying
this brightly tinted clothing.

Torlos turned to Arcot. "The Supreme council asks that
you be seated at the table, in the places left for you."
He paused, then quickly added: "I have told them of your
precautions, and they have said: 'A wise man, having been
received treacherously once, will not again be trapped.' They
approve of your policy of caution.

"The men who sit at the raised portions of the table are
the Supreme Three; the others are their advisors who know
the details of Science, Business, and War. No one man can
know all the branches of human endeavor, and this is but a
meeting place of those who know best the individual lines.
The Supreme Three are elected from the advisors in case of
the death of one of the Three, and they act as co-ordinators
for the rest.

"The man of Science is to your left; directly before you
is the man of Business, and to your right is the Commander
of the Military.

"To whom do you wish to speak first?"

Arcot considered for a moment, then: "I must first tell the
Scientist what it is I have, then tell the Commander how
he can use it, and finally I will tell the Businessman what
will be needed."

Arcot had noticed that the military officers all wore
holsters for their pneumatic pistols, but they were conspicuously
empty. He was both pleased and embarrassed. What
should he do—he, who carried two deadly pistols. He decided
on the least conspicuous course and left them where
they were.

Arcot projected his thoughts at Torlos. "We have come a
vast distance across space, from another galaxy. Let your
astronomer tell them what distance that represents."

Arcot paused while Torlos put the thoughts into the words
of the Nansalian language. A moment later, one of the
scientists, a tall, powerfully built man, even for these men
of giant strength, rose and spoke to the others. When he
was seated, a second rose and spoke also, with an expression
of puzzled wonder.

"He says," Torlos translated, "that his science has taught
him that a speed such as you say you have made is impossible,
but the fact that you are here proves his science
wrong.

"He reasoned that since your kind live on no planet of
this system, you must come from another star. Since his
science says that this is just as impossible as coming from
another galaxy, he is convinced of the fallacy in the theories."

Arcot smiled. The sound reasoning was creditable; the
man did not label as "impossible" something which was
proven by the presence of the two Earthmen.

Arcot tried to explain the physical concepts behind his
space-strain drive, but communication broke down rapidly;
Torlos, a warrior, not a scientist, could not comprehend the
ideas, and was completely unable to translate them into his
own language.

"The Chief Physicist suggests that you think directly
at him," Torlos finally told Arcot. "He suggests that the
thoughts might be more familiar to him than to me." He
grinned. "And they certainly aren't clear to me!"

Arcot projected his thoughts directly toward the physicist;
to his surprise, the man was a perfect receiver. He had
a natural gift for it. Quickly, Arcot outlined the system
that had made his intergalactic voyage possible.

The physicist smiled when Arcot was finished, and tried
to reply, but he was not a good transmitter. Torlos aided
him.

"He says that the science of your people is far ahead of
us. The conceptions are totally foreign to his mind, and he
can only barely grasp the significance of the idea of bent
emptiness that you have given him. He says, however, that
he can fully appreciate the possibility that you have shown
him. He has given your message to the Three, and they are
anxious to hear of the weapons you have."

Arcot drew the molecular pistol, and holding it up for
all to see, projected the general theory of its operation toward
the physicist.

To the Chief Physicist of Nansal, the idea of molecular
energy was an old one; he had been making use of it all
his life, and it was well known that the muscles used the
heat of air to do their work. He understood well how it
worked, but not until Arcot projected into his mind the mental
impression of how the Earthmen had thrown one sun into
another did he realize the vast power of the ray.

Awed, the man translated the idea to his fellows.

Then Arcot drew the heat pistol and explained how the
annihilation of matter within it was converted into pure
heat by the relux lens.

"I will show you how they work," Arcot continued. "Could
we have a lump of metal of some kind?"

The Scientist spoke into an intercom microphone, and
within a few minutes, a large lump of iron—a broken casting—was
brought in. Arcot suspended it on the molecular
beam while Wade melted it with the heat beam. It melted
and collapsed into a ball that glowed brilliantly and flamed
as its surface burned in the oxygen of the air. Wade cut
off his heat ray, and the ball quickly cooled under the influence
of the molecular beam until Arcot lowered it to the
floor, a perfect sphere crusted with ice and frost.

Arcot continued for the better part of an hour to explain
to the Council exactly what he had, how they could be
used, and what materials and processes were needed to make
them.

When he was finished, the Supreme Three conferred for
several minutes. Then the Scientist asked, through Torlos:
"How can we repay you for these things you have given
us?"

"First, we need lead to fuel our ship." Arcot gave them
the exact specifications for the lead wire they needed.

He received his answer from the man of Business and
Manufacturing. "We can give you that easily, for lead is
cheap. Indeed, it seems hardly enough to repay you."

"The second thing we need," Arcot continued, "is information.
We became lost in space and are unable to find our
way home. I would like to explain the case to the Astronomer."

The Astronomer proved to be a man of powerful intelligence
as well as powerful physique, and was a better
transmitter than receiver. It took every bit of Arcot's powerful
mind to project his thoughts to the man.

He explained the dilemma that he and his friends were
in, and told him how he could recognize the Galaxy on his
plates. The Astronomer said he thought he knew of such
a nebula, but he would like to compare his own photographs
with Arcot's to make sure.

"In return," Arcot told him, "we will give you another
weapon—a weapon, this time, to defeat the astronomer's
greatest enemy, distance. It is an electrical telescope which
will permit you to see life on every planet of this system.
With it, you can see a man at a distance ten times as
great as the distance from Nansal to your sun!"

Eagerly, the Astronomer questioned Arcot concerning the
telectroscope, but others were clamoring for Arcot's attention.

The Biologist was foremost among the contenders; he
seemed worried about the possibility of the alien Earthmen
carrying pathogenic bacteria.

"Torlos has told us that you have an entirely different
internal organization. What is it that is different? I can't believe
that he has correctly understood you."

Arcot explained the differences as carefully as possible.
By the time he was finished, the Biologist felt sure that any
such creature was sufficiently far removed from them to be
harmless biologically, but he wanted to study the Man
of Earth further.

Arcot had brought along a collection of medical books
as a possible aid in case of accident. He offered to give
these to Nansal in exchange for a collection of Nansalian
medical texts. The English would have to be worked out
with the aid of a dictionary and a primary working aid
which Arcot would supply. Arcot also asked for a skeleton
to take with him, and the Biologist readily agreed.

"We'd like to give you one in return," Arcot grinned,
"But we only brought four along, and, unfortunately, we
are using them at the moment."

The Biologist smiled back and assured him that they
would not think of taking a piece of apparatus so vitally
necessary to the Earthmen.

The Military Leader was the man who demanded attention
next. Arcot had a long conference with him, and they
decided that the best way for the Military Leader to learn
the war potential of the Ancient Mariner was to personally
see a demonstration of its powers.

The Council decided that the Three would go on the
trip. The Military Commander picked two of his aides to go,
and the Scientist picked the Astronomer and the Physicist.
The head of Business and Manufacturing declined to bring
any of his advisors.

"We would learn nothing," he told Arcot, "and would
only be in the way. I, myself, am going only because I am
one of the Three."

"Very well," said Arcot. "Let's get started."

XXI

The party descended to the ground floor and walked out
to the ship. They filed into the airlock, and in the power
room they looked in amazement at the tiny machines that
ran the ship. The long black cylinder of the main power unit
for the molecular drive looked weak and futile compared to
the bulky machines that ran their own ships. The power
storage coils, with their fields of intense, dead blackness,
interested the Physicist immensely.

The ship was a constant source of wonder to them all.
They investigated the laboratory and then went up to the
second floor. Morey and Fuller greeted them at the door,
and each of the four Earthmen took a group around the
ship, explaining as they went.

The library was a point of great interest, exceeded only
by the control room. Arcot found some difficulty in taking
care of all his visitors; there were only four chairs in the
control room. The Three could sit down, but Arcot needed
the fourth chair to pilot the ship. The rest of the party had
to hold on as best they could, which was not too difficult
for men of such physical strength; they were accustomed to
high accelerations in their elevators.

Morey, Wade, and Fuller strapped themselves into the
seats at the ray projectors at the sides and stern.

Arcot wanted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the ship's
armament first, and then the maneuverability. He picked a
barren hillside for the first demonstration. It was a great
rocky cliff, high above the timber line, towering almost vertically
a thousand feet above them.

Wade triggered his molecular projector, and a pale beam
reached out toward the cliff. Instantly, the cliff leaped ten
miles into the air, whining and roaring as it shot up through
the atmosphere. Then it started to fall. Heated by its motion
through the air, it struck the mountaintop as a mass
of red hot rock which shattered into fragments with a terrific
roar! The rocks rolled and bounced down the mountainside,
their path traced by a line of steam clouds.

Then, at Arcot's order, the heat beams were all turned
on the mountain at full power. In less than a minute, the
peak began to melt, sending streamers of lava down the sides.
The beams began to eat out a crater in the center, where
the rock began to boil furiously under the terrific energy
of the heat beams.

Then Arcot shut off the heat beams and turned on the
molecular ray.

The molecules of the molten rock were traveling at high
velocities—the heat was terrific. Arcot could see that the
rock was boiling quite freely. When the molecular beam hit
it, every one of those fast moving molecules shot upward
together! With the roar of a meteor, it plunged toward
space at five miles a second!