When the power bar was exhausted DuQuesne lifted the sole remaining cylinder into the engine, remarking:
“Well, we should be approximately stationary, relative to Earth. Now we’ll start back.”
He advanced the lever, and for many hours the regular routine of the ship went on. Then DuQuesne on waking, saw that the engine was no longer perpendicular to the floor, but was inclined slightly. He read the angle of inclination on the great circles, then scanned a sector of space. He reduced the current, whereupon all four felt a lurch as the angle was increased many degrees. He read the new angle hastily and restored touring power. He then sat down at the computer and figured—with that much power on, a tremendous and unnerving job.
“What’s the matter, doctor?” Dorothy asked.
“We’re being deflected a little from our course.”
“Is that bad?”
“Ordinarily, no. Every time we pass a star its gravity pulls us a little out of line. But the effects are slight, do not last long. and tend to cancel each other out. This is too big and has lasted altogether too long. If it keeps on, we could miss the solar system altogether; and I can’t find anything to account for it”
He watched the bar anxiously, expecting to see it swing back into the vertical, but the angle grew steadily larger. He again reduced the current and searched the heavens for the troublesome body.
“Do you see it yet?” Dorothy asked, apprehensively.
“No . . . but this optical system could be improved. I could do better with night-glasses, I think.”
He brought out a pair of grotesque-looking binoculars and stared through them out of an upper window for perhaps five minutes.
“Good God!” he exclaimed. “It’s a dead star and we’re almost onto it!”
Springing to the board, he whirled the bar into and through the vertical, then measured the apparent diameter of the strange object. Then, after cautioning the others, he put on more power than he had been using. After exactly fifteen minutes he slackened off and made another reading. Seeing his expression, Dorothy was about to speak, but he forestalled her.
“We lost more ground. It must be a lot bigger than anything known to our astronomers. And I’m not trying to pull away from it; just to make an orbit around it. We’ll have to put on full power—take seats!”
He left full power on until the bar was nearly gone and made another series of observations. “Not enough,” he said, quietly.
Perkins screamed and flung himself upon the floor; Margaret clutched at her heart with both hands; Dorothy, though her eyes looked like black holes in her white face, looked at him steadily and asked, “This is the end, then?”
“Not yet.” His voice was calm and level. “It’ll take two days, more or less, to fall that far, and we have a little copper left for one last shot. I’m going to figure the angle to make that last shot as effective as possible.”
“Won’t the repulsive outer coating do any good?”
“No; it’ll be gone long before we hit. I’d strip it and feed it to the engine if I could think of a way of getting it off.”
He lit a cigarette and sat at ease at the computer. He sat there, smoking and computing, for over an hour. He then changed, very slightly, the angle of the engine.
“Now we look for copper,” he said. “There isn’t any in the ship itself—everything electrical is silver, down to our flashlights and the bases of the lamps. But examine the furnishings and all your personal stuff—anything with copper or brass in it. That includes metallic money—pennies, pickles, and silver.”
They found a few items, but very few. DuQuesne added his watch, his heavy signet ring, his keys, his tie-clasp, and the cartridges from his pistol. He made sure that Perkins did not hold anything out. The girls gave up not only their money and cartridges but their jewelry, including Dorothy’s engagement ring.
“I’d like to keep it, but . . .” She said, as she added it to the collection.
“Everything goes that has any copper in it; and I’m glad Seaton’s too much of a scientist to buy platinum jewelry. But, if we get away, I doubt very much if you’ll be able to see any difference in your ring. Very little copper in it—but we need every milligram we can get.”
He threw all the metal into the power chamber and advanced the lever. It was soon spent; and after the final observation, while the others waited in suspense, he made his curt announcement.
“Not quite enough.”
Perkins, his mind already weakened, went completely insane. With a wild howl he threw himself at the unmoved scientist, who struck him on the head with the butt of his pistol as he leaped. The force of the blow crushed Perkin’s head and drove his body to the other side of the ship. Margaret looked as though she were about to faint. Dorothy and DuQuesne looked at each other. To the girl’s amazement the man was as calm as though he were in his own room at home on earth. She made an effort to hold her voice steady. “What next, doctor?”
“I don’t exactly know. I still haven’t been able to work out a method of recovering that plating . . . It’s so thin that there isn’t much copper, even on a sphere as big as this one.”
“Even if you could get it, and it were enough, we’d starve anyway, wouldn’t we?” Margaret, holding herself together desperately, tried to speak lightly.
“Not necessarily. That would give me time to figure out something else to do.”
“You wouldn’t have to figure anything else,” Dorothy declared. “Maybe you won’t, anyway. You said we have two days?”
“My observations were crude, but it’s a little over two days—about forty-nine and a half hours now. Why?”
“Because Dick and Martin Crane will find us before very long. Quite possibly within two days”
“Not in this life. If they tried to follow us they’re both dead now.”
“That’s where even you are wrong!” she flashed. “They knew all the time exactly what you were doing to our old Skylark, so they built another one, that you never knew anything about. And they know a lot about this new metal that you never heard of, too, because it wasn’t in those plans you stole!”
DuQuesne went directly to the heart of the matter, paying no attention to her barbs. “Can they follow us in space without seeing us?” he demanded.
“Yes. At least, I think they can.”
“How do they do it?”
“I don’t know. I wouldn’t tell you, if I did!”
“You think not? I won’t argue the point at the moment. If they can find us—which I doubt—I hope they detect this dead star in time to keep away from it—and us.”
“But why?” Dorothy gasped. “You’ve been trying to kill both of them—wouldn’t you be glad to take them with us?”
“Please try to be logical. Far from it. There’s no connection. I tried to kill them, yes, because they stood in the way of my development of this new metal. If, however, I am not going to be the one to do it—I certainly hope Seaton goes ahead with it. It’s the greatest discovery ever made, bar none; and if both Seaton and I, the only two men able to develop it properly, get killed it will be lost, perhaps for hundreds of years.”
“If he must go, too, I hope he doesn’t find us . . . but I don’t believe it. I simply know he could get us away from here.”
She continued more slowly, almost speaking to herself, her heart sinking with her voice, “He’s following us and he won’t stop even if he knows he can’t get away.”
“There’s no denying the fact that our situation is critical; but as long as I’m alive I can think. I’m going to dope out some way of getting that copper.”
“I hope you do.” Dorothy kept her voice from breaking only by a tremendous effort. “I see Peggy’s fainted. I wish I could. I’m worn out.”
She drew herself down upon one of the seats and stared at the ceiling, fighting an almost overpowering impulse to scream.
Thus time wore on—Perkins dead; Margaret unconscious; Dorothy lying in her seat, her thoughts a formless prayer, buoyed only by her faith in God and in her lover; DuQuesne self-possessed, smoking innumerable cigarettes, his keen mind at grips with its most desperate problem, grimly fighting until the very last instant of life—while the powerless spaceship fell with an appalling velocity, and faster and yet faster, toward that cold and desolate monster of the heavens.
Chapter 13
Seaton and Crane drove the Skylark at high acceleration in the direction indicated by the unwavering compass, each man taking a twelve-hour trick at the board.