George O. Smith

“ Space, to him, is something that you can't breathe, and the stars are little bits of brightness that twinkle on a clear night. Oh, we get along," smiled McBride. "After all, he's Grandpa now, and John Junior is likely to get a slab of Cupralum. Preferred, for his birthday. The kid'll prefer something he can chew on, I'll bet."
"So that's neither here nor there," said Enid. "You take your space hop, and I'll take Little Johnny to Pluto to see his grandparents. Frankly, Steve, I've been wondering just what excuse I could use to run off alone for a month. This makes it perfect." ”

“ You see, Steve, Dad and John talk different languages. Dad is a metal broker on Pluto. The only reason why he tolerated John at all was because John's lens kept Dad in business. Dad wouldn't know a cupralum pig from an acceleration cushion, though he deals in a million tons of the stuff every year. It's all on paper. On the other hand, John wouldn't know how to sell the stuff, but he sure can make it do tricks. So they sit and glare at one another and each one wonders how the other makes a living. ”

“ But, darn it, I want to plant my number eleven EE's on that planet. Anyone agree?"
"Anyone who doesn't like the idea may get out and walk," said Hammond. "Hold your hat, fellows. Here we go again—"
Sandra Drake reached out of her luxurious bed and pulled a cord. She did it in a languorous move, like a lithe and lazy cat. She did it with a sort of God-given right to do so, and her expression was one of deep self-delight. Whatever she got from Telfu, they owed to Sandra Drake—
Her second pull on the call-cord was more of an impertinent yank. ”

“ I think that we can safely assume that the warp is another space and that we were not traveling better than the speed of light with respect to our own space."
"Whoof! What a theory! Drag that one past again, slow enough so I can climb aboard."
"You got it," laughed McBride. "And if it smells, you fling out a better one for us to shoot holes in."
"O.K. But to get back to velocity, the human anatomy can stand velocity without limit. Period. Argue if you like, Mac, but that's my statement. No one has ever been able to prove that velocity alone is harmful to man, beast, bird, or fish!" ”

“ Never having anything of any great power operating, they never got to the point where they could build anything big enough to get off of Telfu. Just plain stuck. Well, fellers, if that moonlet is cupralum, I can see a lot of birds mining it."
"How're they going to land on it? Nothing gravitic will be worth a hoot that close."
"Lift 'em off the dead spot by battery-powered gravitics. Inefficient as hell. Get into space and then use rockets to land on that moonlet. Mine it. Load it full of detonite and blast."
"A hundred-mile moonlet?"
"They've got a nine-thousand-mile planet here to support it. ”

“ Frankly, Sandra Drake is an awful lot of woman, and she knows it. She'd make a plaster saint turn to whistle at her if she turned on the old charm. And with no competition, we'd be fighting one another for the privilege of polishing her shoes. ”

“ They stay. We go Terra."
"Terra!" exploded Hammond.
"Much to learn—both of us. You and I. You learn Telfan. We learn Terran. Better talk. This ... lousy."
"Easy to see Sandra's delicate hand in this language lesson," grinned Timkins.
"Better call that wild woman. Tell her we're going to take off in one hour and ten minutes because if we don't, we'll be as stuck as she is and we don't like that. As long as we have a bit of Telfu to take back with us in the shape of Tet'h and his woman Thani, we needn't stick around. I'll feel better about getting off on this rotation anyway. ”

“ The Haywire Queen approached and passed the speed of light from the hard side, and her terrific velocity dropped down to a figure that was expressible in miles per second without running out of zeroes. Below, and thirty degrees from the axis of the ship, Sirius and the Dark Companion beckoned from less than a thousand million miles. The lower dome of the ship sported the faces of the men, who were laying on their stomachs, looking down at the splendor of the first binary ever seen by man. Hammond mentioned it, as a matter of fact.
"How about Drake?" asked McBride. ”

“ A totally useless and good-for-nothing alloy prior to the discovery of the gravitic spectrum."
"Must be fairly large," suggested Timkins.
"Sure—according to man-made standards. Celestially, it might be a mere scrap of dirt. A sub-sub-sub-microscopic bit of cosmic dust less than a hundred miles in diameter."
"Ugh," grunted Larry. "You make man and his works sort of insignificant."
"We are. Do the planets care what we do on their miles-thick hides? Do the suns care that we wonder at them? Does the cosmos give a rap that we chase from planet to planet and from sun to sun?" ”

“ But the prime drive is O.K. The meters say so. It's just inefficient as the devil which is not true of a good drive. Holy smoke! We're getting efficient again!"
Timkins picked himself off of the floor painfully. "Uh-huh," he grunted. "Also, we're leaving Telfu behind at a fierce rate. Can you keep that eleven feet prime acceleration for a bit?"
"We're going to."
"I'm going to dash madly upstairs and hang the sigma recorder on again. Something is slippery here."
"What's our velocity at the present time?" asked McBride.
"Up in the fifteen thousand miles per second," answered Hammond. ”

“ It was a dead-center passage, one that could be made only with a master pilot running the board personally.
Then she was gone. Halfway around the lens she would have to go before Sirius came into a safe line of flight. Sandra was taking no more chances on contacting the surface of that mighty space-warp that focused Sol on Pluto.
McBride wondered: Has Sandra learned her lesson?
One week passed. One week, filled to the very brim with all of those routine things that make life full of wonder—as to whether there isn't something better in the hereafter. ”

“ John kissed Enid adequately, and said: "Stay healthy."
Enid laughed and said: "Stay whole!"
And then McBride was in the Haywire Queen and the air lock was cracked. The big ship lifted gently and zipped out of the lock with a casual disregard for distances. Unlike Drake's precision take-off, the Haywire Queen went through the open door with the air of wanting to leave quickly because there were better things to do than worry about hitting the center plus or minus an inch.
Enid pointed out the Dog Star to John McBride, Junior. "That's where your daddy is going," she told him. ”

“ Proportionally, man is smaller than the filterable virus. So we have a slab of cupralum, which is—according to Mac—Here! That's fine. It blankets Telfu like a complete shroud, as far as the good old gravitics go."
Larry Timkins looked up from a page of scrawled equations. "A slab of cupralum a hundred miles in diameter, rotating in the mechanogravitic field thrown out by Sirius would certainly soak up every bit of power. Must be a slick tie-in. The gravitron puts our O.K. on a resistive load. Hooked to the drive, everything goes phhht." ”

“ They'll thank me for coming first, even though they know I'm not the bright guy with the answers under my skull. I've got a good thing here, and I know all of you well enough to know that you won't spoil it."
"No?"
"Sure you won't. After all, there isn't one of you that would care a rap for what they have to offer in the way of historic gain. The old moola, sure; and there's plenty of it to be had for all of us. You'll go down in their histories as the geniuses that gave them a boot in the tail worth a hundred years of solid research. ”

“ Follow?"
"At some distance."
"I believe that we will find a place where the cusp really comes down closer to Telfu," said McBride. "How much drive inefficiency can we tolerate and still lift?"
"From Telfu? Not enough to keep the breakers from blowing. And don't say wire 'em shut. They're right on the ragged edge now, on account of we know what we're doing and do not want to blow circuit breakers during experiments unless they are really in trouble. But the gravitron-cupralum driving equipment is not our only ace in the bucket. ”

“ The physical properties of ... Telfu ... seem to be all right. So we'll go to work on the electrical properties, the nuclear properties, and also see if there's anything running around loose in the gravitics other than the inherent mechanogravitic property of matter."
Larry Timkins set up a series of plungers on the control board and locked the pre-set operations into the autopilot. "This," he said, "will hang us on a logarithmic spiral approaching Telfu. While we're roaming around the planet, we'll check the hot-properties of the neighborhood. ”

“ Meanwhile, let's take it strictly on the easy side and investigate everything from the solar radiation from Sirius to the secondary radiation produced by Sirian radiation in the super-stratosphere."
Larry began to fiddle with the radio. There was nothing on the electronic radio at all, and Larry said: "Well, didn't expect it, really. No culture worthy of the name would be using radio in space. Too inefficient. And if they got off of their planets, they'd be using gravitics." ”

“ Whatever transpired, whatever they discussed, whatever plans they made—and they must have talked of many things and made many plans, for in spite of the familiarity of running all over the solar system, this was a big step, indeed, since for the first time in history, man and wife would be light-years apart—they did it well enough in private so that their parting was simple and quick. ”

“ McBride lowered the spectrograph to the table and seated himself in the chair.
"Woah, Nellie," grunted McBride as the alarm bells ceased. "Where do we go from here and how fast?"
"I dunno, but we're leaving both Sirius and Sol at a terrific velocity and a deceleration of eleven feet per. From a mental calculation of the fundamental drive at this velocity, I'd say it would take about fourteen years to get down to a stop."
"What happened to the emergency relays?"
"They worked," said Steve dryly. "Yeah, they worked. But the inefficiency extends to the fundamental drive, too, it seems. ”

“ What's our velocity, Larry?"
Timkins looked at the velocimeter; squinted through the instrument quickly, adjusting the thumb-screw; and then said: "Thirty-four thousand and dropping at one hundred feet per second, per second, per second."
"We can get good pix of anything close enough to the primary to support life—also big enough, too—in about thirty minutes exposure," said Hammond. "We'll take two shots in each direction, since I've got six hemispherical cameras. That'll give us complete overlapping coverage and double protection against dust streaks. Let's go. Also cut the drive by half." ”

“ Sandra didn't answer, and at that moment, McBride's men came with their tools. Wordlessly, they nodded to Sandra and then followed McBride into the Lady Luck.
McBride wasted no time. "Al," he said, "you fit the mag-G for vertical bi-lobar field to cover the nose of the crate with the top lobe, and Westy, you see that the mech-G generator in the nose induces the proper vectors in the cupralum bar. I'll get Hank and Jim to touch up the wiring and safety devices. We'll have this crate back in space within the hour!"
"Working a little fast, aren't you?" asked Sandra. ”

“ He juggled the dials until the gadget started to work, and then they began to check the efficiency of the device.
McBride muttered: "Power generating equipment is running O.K."
"Yeah," agreed Hammond. "Everything's on the beam from the explosion chamber to the inverted alphatron. We've got plenty of potential power handy. Larry, zoop in close and check the power equipment on a pure, resistive load."
"You mean shut off the drive and coast through the zero region with no drive and with the gravitron running at full output on resistance load?" ”

“ We have named it Soaky."
"There is a slight discrepancy between this cardioid and the calculated curve," said McBride. "Obviously, the cusp would be on a line between Telfu and Soaky, projected from the satellite through the planet to the far side. We orbited around the planet and were closer to Soaky on the side he was on—"
"Is that syllogistic reasoning?" asked Hammond. "Or sheer conjecture? How about shadow?"
"This is quite a wide effect."
"Any shading of Soaky's sphere of influence would tend to deepen the cusp like that. That cardioid is such a curve ”

“ Cupralum, to Enid's father, is something that he shunts around by signing papers and which, if he shunts fast enough, will increase his bank account, though if the other guy shunts faster, will cause him no end of deficit. ”

“ Oh well, a lack of free E-grav energy surely isn't anything to write home about. Might be a factor of the Sirian Double. After all, who knows what kind of effect that little, dark-red, dense-as-hell devil will do to gravitic threshold levels."
"So it's a safe bet—"
Timkins came running in, waving a sheet of cross-ruled paper. "Hell's bells," he yelled. "We're it! Our drive is approaching zero efficiency as the third power of—"
Above, in the working innards of the Haywire Queen, great circuit breakers crashed open. ”

“ But I want to do it in such a way that Sandra Drake will know that it was far from purely coincidental."
"O.K., Steve. We're with you. Larry, throw the Haywire Queen into an orbit around Telfu just outside of the danger zone and slap another recorder on the drive. Make it a high velocity orbit, powered all the way. We should be able to circle Telfu in about fifteen minutes with the super drive. Check?" ”