Nelson Slade Bond

“ After all, Lancelot Biggs and I are old buddies. Once we were bunkmates, even. There came back to me a measure of the confidence I had once had in him. And I nodded to Todd.
"Try it, Dick. We've got nothing to lose and everything to gain. Give the order."
He did. Chief Garrity must have been startled but he was too good a spaceman to argue an order from the bridge. He said, succinctly, "Aye, sirr!" And then—
I felt the rocking plunge. The moment of brief, incredible dizziness of frightful speed being intensified to the limiting velocity of light. ”

“ Because love or no love, fear or no fear, a spaceman has a tradition to live up to. And Lancelot Biggs had tossed into the discard the very tradition now upheld by Dick Todd as he said, quietly, "Shall I advise the men, sir?"
And by Captain Hanson who said, "Yes, Todd. And—and order Garrity to cut off Mr. Biggs' intensifier. We may die, but we can die trying to escape. And a slower speed will give us more time—"
"Yes, sir," said Todd, and moved toward the audio. ”

“ Hanson's eyes were round and wild and fearful.
"But then—where is he! We've got to turn around right away. Find him! We can't go back without—"
I shook my head.
"It's no use, Skipper. He may be in this universe, infinitely small, traveling at infinite speed; he may be in some other universe undreamed by man. He may be living, he may be dead. But wherever he is—he is gone forever from the ken of man. Lancelot Biggs is—dead. So far as man is concerned, he is dead."
Dick Todd said something then. ”

“ Hence it did not affect, nor was it affected in any way by, the bulk and mass of Jupiter.
"It's as though an exceedingly fine wire, moving at lightning speed, were to be propelled through a cake of ice. Only in our case, the 'wire' was of zero dimension, and the cake of ice—Jupiter—did not even recognize that it had been penetrated.
"But—" I shook, my head. "But Mr. Biggs realized what this daring scheme meant. It meant that in addition to our size being reduced to the infinitesimal, our mass would be raised to the infinite—for that is the corollary of the contraction theory. ”

“ Todd a plot-chart. Four days hence when I cut out the V-I unit and return to normal operation on the hypos, we will find Uranus immediately beneath us. And now, if you'll excuse—"
"Wait a minute!" said the skipper. "Suppose we was to meet up with something in space? Like a rogue asteroid?"
Biggs shrugged.
"That hazard is neither heightened nor decreased," he said. "Our monitor-beams will still shunt off the smaller ones. As for the larger—well, you know as well as I that we have never yet found a method of overcoming that danger. It is one of the chances we take when we don space blues. ”

“ I wailed. "I knew it!"
"But," continued Biggs proudly, "with this velocity intensifier attachment, our potential speed is restrained by only one factor. The limiting velocity of light, or 186,000 miles per second"
"In other words, the Saturn is now capable of a top speed of more than 650,000,000 miles per hour?
I gasped. I said, "Huh? You mean," I said, "the trip to Uranus will take only a little more than two hours?" ”

“ The longest-living author of this work died in 2006, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 16 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
It is imperative that contributors search the renewal databases and ascertain that there is no evidence of a copyright renewal before using this license. Failure to do so will result in the deletion of the work as a copyright violation. ”

“ And when do we turn on that thingamajigger of your'n? Bert, where'd you find him? Shut up, you blabbermouth! Don't you know better than to talk when a space officer is cogitating? Can I help, Biggs?"
The one-man wordstorm was deafening. But it didn't seem to phase [sic] Biggs. He plunked himself down at the pilot's desk, scribbled for a while, and came up with an orbit chart for Second Mate Dick Todd, seated at the control-board.
Then he heaved a volley of orders over the audio to Chief Engineer Garrity, and that was that. He relaxed. The skipper said nervously, "Is—is that all?" ”