she drove into his groin.
That ended it. To make sure, however-or to keep Barbara from knowing that she had
killed a man?-Deston and Jones each put a bullet through the falling head before it struck
the floor.
Both girls flung themselves into their husbands’ arms. “Oh, I killed him, Carl!” Barbara
sobbed. “And the worst of it is, I really meant to! I never did anything like that before in .
. .”
“You didn’t kill him, Barbara,” Adams said.
“Huh?” She raised her head from Deston’s shoulder; the contrast between streaming
eyes and dawning relief was almost funny. “Why, I did too! I know I did!”
“By no means, my dear. Nor did Bernice kill Newman. Fists and knees and chairs do not
kill instantly; bullets through the brain do. The autopsies will show, I’m quite certain, that
these four men died instantly of gunshot wounds.”
With the gangsters out of the way, life aboardship settled down, but not into a routine.
When two spacemen and two grounder girls are trying to do the work of a full crew, no
routine is possible. Adams, much older than the others and working even longer hours,
became haggard and thin.
“But this work is necessary, my dear children,” he informed the two girls when they
remonstrated with him. “This material is all new. There are many extremely difficult
problems involved and I have less than a year left to work on them. Less than one year,
and it is a task for many men and all the resources of a research center.”
To the officers, however, he went into more detail. “Considering the enormous amounts
of supplies carried; the scope, quantity, and quality of the devices employed; it is highly
improbable that we are the first survivors of this type of catastrophe to set course for a
planet.”
After some discussion, the officers agreed with him. “While I can not as yet analyze or
evaluate it, we are carrying an extremely heavy charge of an unknown nature; the
residuum of a field of force which is possibly more or less analogous to the
electromagnetic field. This residuum either is or is not dischargeable to an object of
planetary mass. I am now virtually certain that it is; and I am of the opinion that its
discharge is ordinarily of such violence as to destroy the starship carrying it.”.
“Good God!” Deston exclaimed. “Oh-that was what you meant by `fantastic
precautions’?”
“Precisely.”
“Any idea of what those precautions will have to be?” “No. This is all so new … and I
know .so little . . . and am working with pitifully inadequate instrumentation . . . however,
we have months of time yet, and if I an unable to derive a solution before arrival-I don’t
mean a rigorous analysis, of course; merely a method of discharge having a probability
of success of at least point nine-we will remain in orbit around that sun until I do.”
The Procyon bored on through space at one gravity of acceleration; and one gravity,
maintained for months, builds up to an extremely high velocity. And, despite the Einstein
Effect, that acceleration was maintained, for there was no lack of power. The Procyon’s
uranium driven Wesleys did not drive the ship, but only energized the Chaytor Effect
engines that tapped the total energy of the universe.
Thus, in seven months of flight, the spaceship had probably attained a velocity of about
six-tenths that of light.
The men did not know the day or date or what their actual velocity was, since the
brute-force machine that was their only clock could not be depended upon for either
accuracy or uniformity. Also, and worse, there was of course no possibility of
determining what, if anything, the Einstein Effect was doing to their time rate.
At the estimated midpoint of the flight the Procyon was turned end for end; and, a few
days later, Barbara and Deston cornered Adams in his laboratory.
“Listen, you egregious clam!” she began. “I know that Bun and I both have been pregnant
for at least eight months and we ought to be twice as big as we are. You’ve been
studying us constantly with a hundred machines that nobody ever heard of before and all
you’ve said is blah. Now, Uncle Andy, I want the truth. Are we in a lot of trouble?”
“Trouble?” Adams was amazed. “Of course not. None at all. Perfectly normal fetuses,
both of them. Perfectly.” “But for what age?” she demanded. “Four months, maybe?”
“But that’s the crux!” Adams enthused. “Fascinating; and indubitably supremely important.
A key datum. If this zeta field is causing it, that gives me a tremendously powerful new
tool, for certain time vectors in the generalized matrix become parameters. Thus certain
determinants, notably the all-important delta-prime-sub-mu, become manipulable by …
but you aren’t listening!”
“I’m listening, pops, but nothing is coming through. But I’m awfully glad I’m not going to
give birth to a monster,” and she led Deston away. “Carl, have you got the foggiest idea
of what he was talking about?”
“Not the foggiest-that was over my head like a cirrus cloud-but if you gals’ slowness in
producing will help the old boy lick this thing I’m all for it, believe me.”
Months passed. Two perfect babies-Theodore Warner Deston and Barbara Bernice
Jones-were born, four days apart, in perfectly normal fashion. Adams made out birth
certificates which were unusual in only one respect; the times, dates, and places of the
births were to be determined later.
A couple of weeks before arrival Adams rushed up to Deston and Jones. “I have it!” he
shouted, and began to spout a torrent of higher-very much higher-mathematics.
“Hold it, Doc!” Deston protested. “I read you zero and ten. Can’t you delouse your
signal?”
“W-e-I-I.” The scientist looked hurt, but did abandon the high math. “The discharge is
catastrophic; energy of the order of magnitude of ten thousand average discharges of
lightning. I do not know what it is, but it is virtually certain that we will be able to
discharge it, not in the one tremendous blast of contact with the planet, but in successive
decrements by the use of long, thin leads extending downward toward a high point of the
planet.” “Wire, you mean? What kind?”
“The material is unimportant except in that it should have sufficient tensile strength to
support as many miles as possible of its own length.”
“We’ve got dozens of coils of hook-up wire,” Deston said, “but not too many miles and
it’s soft stuff.”
Jones snapped his finger. “Graham wire!”
`Of course,’ Deston agreed. “Hundreds of miles of it aboard. We’ll float the censer down
on a Hotchkiss. . . .” “Tear-out,” Jones objected.
“Bailey it-and spider the. Bailey out to eighteen or twenty pads. We can cannibal the
whole Middle for metal.”
“Sure. But surges-backlash. We’ll have to remote it.” No, problem there; servos all over
the place. To Baby Two.”
“Would you mind delousing your signal?” Adams asked caustically.
” Scuse, please, Doc. A guy does talk better in his own lingo, doesn’t he? Graham wire
is used for re-wrapping the Grahams, you know.”
“No, I don’t know. What are Grahams?”
“Why, they’re the intermediates between the Wesleys and the Chaytors … okay, okay;
Graham wire is one-point-three-millimeter-diameter ultra-high-tensile alloy wire. Used for
re-enforcing hollow containers that have to stand terrific pressure.”
“Such wire is exactly what will be required. Note now that our bodies will have to be
grounded very thoroughly to the metal of the ship.”
“You’re so right. We’ll wrap up to the eyeballs in silver mesh and run leads as big as my
arm to the frame.” They approached their target planet. It was twice as massive as
Earth; its surface was rugged and jagged; its mountain ranges had sharp peaks over
forty thousand feet high.
“There’s one more thing we must do,” Adams said. “This zeta field may very well be
irreplaceable. We must therefore launch all the lifecraft except Number Two into
separate orbits, so that a properly-staffed and properly-equipped force may study that
field.”
It was done; and in a few hours the Procyon hung motionless, a thousand miles high,
directly above an isolated and sharp mountain peak.
The Bailey boom, with its spider-web-like network of grounding cables and with a large
pulley at its end, extended two hundred feet straight out from the Procyon’s side. A
twenty-five-mile coil of Graham wire had been mounted on the remote-controlled
Hotchkiss reel. The end of the wire had been run out over the pulley; a fifteen-pound
weight, to act both as a “sensor” and to keep the wire from fouling, had been attached;
and the controls had been tested.
Now, in Lifecraft Two-as far away from the “business district” as they could be.-the
human bodies were grounded and Deston started the reel. The whole coil ran out, as
expected, with no action. Then, slowly and carefully, Deston let the big ship float straight