Worse, really, because we did not have Martin and Dick with us then.”
“At-a-girl, Peg!” Seaton cheered. “We may be lost-guess we are, temporarily, at least-
but we’re not licked, not by seven thousand rows of apple trees!”
“I fail to perceive any very solid basis for your optimism,”
Crane remarked quietly, “but you have an idea, of course. What is it?”
“Pick out the galaxy nearest our line of flight and brake down for it.” Seaton’s nimble mind
was leaping ahead. “The Lark’s so full of uranium that her skin’s bulging, so we’ve got
power to burn. In that galaxy there are-there must he -suns with habitable, possibly
inhabited, planets. We’ll find one such planet and land on it. Then we’ll do with our might
what our hands find to do.”
“Such as?”
“Along what lines?” queried Dorothy and Crane simultaneously.
“Space ship, probably-Two’s entirely too small to be of any account in intergalactic
work,” Seaton replied promptly. “Or maybe fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-order projectors: or
maybe some kind of an ultra-ultra radio or projector. How do I know, from here? But
there’s thousands of things that maybe we can do-we’ll wait until we get there to worry
about which one to try first.”
14 WANTED-A PLANET
Seaton strode over to the control board and applied maximum acceleration. “Might as
well start traveling, Mart,” he remarked to Crane, who for almost as hour had been
devoting the highest telescopic power of number six visiplate to spectroscopic,
interferometric, and spectrophotometric studies of half a dozen selected nebulae. “No
matter which one you pick out we’ll have to have quite a lot of positive acceleration yet
before we reverse to negative.”
“As a preliminary measure, might it not be a good p’-in to gain some idea as to our
present line of flight?” Crane asked dryly, bending a quizzical glance upon his friend. “You
know a great deal more than I do about the hypothesis of linear departure of
incompatible and incommensurable spaces, however, and so perhaps you already know
our true course.”
“Ouch! Pals, they got me!” Seaton clapped a hand over his heart; then, seizing his own
ear, he led himself up to the switchboard and shut off the space drive, except for the
practically negligible superimposed thirty-two feet per second per second which gave to
the Skylark’s occupants a normal gravitational force.
“Why, Dick, how perfectly silly!” Dorothy chuckled. “What’s the matter? All you’ve got to
do is . . .”
“Silly, says you?” Seaton, still blushing, interrupted her. “Woman, you don’t know the half
of it! I’m just plain dumb, and Mart was tactfully calling my attention to the fact. Them’s
soft words that the slatlike string bean just spoke, but believe me, Red-Top, he packs a
wicked wallop in that silken glove!”
“Keep still a minute, Dick, and look at the bar!” Dorothy protested. “Everything’s on zero,
so we must be still going straight up, and all you have to do to get back somewhere near
our own galaxy is to turn it around. Why didn’t one of you brilliant thinkers-or have I
overlooked a bet?”
“Not exactly. You don’t know about those famous linear departures, but I do. I haven’t
that excuse-I simply went off half cocked again. You see, it’s like this: Even if those
gyroscopes retained their orientation unchanged through the fourth-dimensional
translation, which may or may not be the case, that line wouldn’t mean a thing as far as
getting back is concerned.
“We took one gosh-awful jump in going through hyperspace, you know, and we have no
means at all of determining whether we jumped up, down, or side wise. Nope, he’s right,
as usual-we can’t do anything intelligently until he finds out, from the shifting of spectral
lines and so on, in what direction we actually are traveling. How’re you coming with it,
Mart?”
“For really precise work we shall require photographs, but I have made six preliminary
observations, as nearly on rectangular coordinates as possible, from which you can
calculate a first-approximation course which will serve until we can obtain more precise
data. Here are my rough notes upon the spectra.”
“All right, while you’re taking your pictures I’ll run them off on the calculator. From the
looks of those shifts I’d say I could hit our course within five degrees, which is close
enough for a few days, at least.”
Seaton soon finished his calculations. He then read off from the great graduated hour-
and declination-circles of the gyroscope cage the course upon which the power bar was
then set, and turned with a grin to Crane, who had just opened the shutter for his first
time exposure.
“We were off plenty, Mart,” he admitted. “About ninety degrees minus declination and
something like plus seven hours’ right ascension, so we’ll have to forget all our old data
and start out from scratch. That won’t hurt us much, though, since we haven’t any idea
where we are, anyway.
“We’re heading about ten degrees or so to the right of that nebula over there, which is
certainly a mighty long ways off from where I thought we were going. I’ll put on full
positive and point ten degrees to the left of it. Probably you’d better read it now, and by
taking a set of observations, say a hundred hours apart, we can figure when we’ll have to
reverse acceleration.
“While you’re doing that I thought I’d start seeing what I could do about a fourth-order
projector. It’ll take a long time to build, and we’ll need one bad when we get inside that
galaxy. What do you think?”
“I think that both of those ideas are sound,” Crane assented, and each man bent to his
task.
Crane took his photographs and studied each of the six key nebulae with every resource
of his ultrarefined instruments. Having determined the Skylark’s course and speed, and
knowing her acceleration, he was able at last to set upon the power bar an automatically
varying control of such a nature that her resultant velocity was directly toward the
lenticular nebula nearest her line of flight.
That done, he continued his observations at regular intervals-constantly making smaller
his limit of observational error, constantly so altering the power and course of the vessel
that the selected galaxy would be reached in the shortest possible space of time
consistent with a permissible final velocity.
And in the meantime Seaton labored upon the projector. It had been out of the question,
of course, to transfer to tiny Two the immense mechanism which had made of Three a
sentient, almost living, thing; but, equally of course, he had brought along the force-band
transformers and selectors, and as much as possible of the other essential apparatus.
He had been obliged to leave behind, however, the very heart of the fifth-order
installation-the precious lens of neutronium–and its lack was now giving him deep
concern.
“What’s the matter, Dickie? You look as though you had lost your last friend.” Dorothy
intercepted him one day as he paced about the narrow confines of the control room, face
set and eyes unseeing.
“Not quite that, but ever since I finished that fourth order outfit I’ve been trying to figure
out something to take the place of that lens we had in Three, so that I can go ahead on
the fifth, but that seems to be one thing for which there is absolutely no substitute. It’s
like trying to unscrew the inscrutable-it can’t be done.”
“If you can’t get along without it, why didn’t you bring it along, too?”
“Couldn’t.”
“Why?” she persisted.
“Nothing strong enough to hold it. In some ways it’s worse than atomic energy. It’s so hot
and under such pressure that if that lens were to blow up in Omaha it would burn up the
whole United States, from San Francisco to New York City. It takes either thirty feet of
solid inoson or else a complete force-bracing to stand the pressure. We had neither, no
time to build anything, and couldn’t have taken it through hyperspace even if we could
have held it safely.”
“Does that mean. . . ”
“No. It simply means that we’ll have to start at the fourth again and work up. I did bring
along a couple of good big faidons, so that all we’ve got to do is find a planet heavy
enough and solid enough to anchor a full-sized fourth-order projector on, within twenty
light-years of a white dwarf star.”
“Oh, is that all? You two’ll do that, all right”
“Ain’t it wonderful, the confidence some women have in their husbands?” Seaton asked
Crane, who was studying through number six visiplate and the fourth-order projector the
enormous expanse of the strange galaxy at whose edge they now were. “I think maybe
we’ll be able to pull it off, though, at that. Of course we aren’t close enough yet to find
such minutiae as planets, but how are things shaping up in general?”
“Quite encouraging! This galaxy is certainly of the same order of magnitude as our own,