Complete Short Fiction, page 320
Instantly, he felt impatient, unwilling to accept the need to adjust to the possibility that there had been trouble aboard. He said urgently, “Keep trying! It’s obviously stuck. That lock was built to open in less than two minutes.”
He was scarcely aware of how completely the others had let him take control of rescue operations. In a way, it was natural enough. The Molly D. was a commercial salvage vessel, which had been commandeered by the Space Patrol. Now that Hewitt was aboard, the representative of the Patrol, Lieutenant Commander Mardonell, had assumed the role of observer. And the permanent captain of the vessel took instructions, as a matter of course, from the man paying the bills.
More than an hour later, the giant magnet had turned the round lock-door just a little over one foot. Pale, tense and astounded, Hewitt held counsel with the two officers.
The altimeter of the Molly D. showed ninety-one miles. Lieutenant Commander Mardonell made the decisive comment about that. “We’ve come down about nine miles in sixty-eight minutes. At that rate we’ll strike some high landmark in ten hours.”
It was evident that it would take much longer than that to unscrew the thirty-five yards of thread on the lock-door at one foot per hour.
Hewitt considered the situation angrily. He still thought of this whole boarding problem as a minor affair, an irritation. “We’ll have to get a big drill,” he said. “Cut through the wall.”
He radioed for one to be sent ahead. But, even with the full authority of the Space Patrol behind him, two and a half hours went by before it was in position. Hewitt gave the order to start the powerful drill motor. He left instructions: “Call me when we’re about to penetrate.”
He had been progressively aware of exhaustion, as much mental as physical. He retreated to one of the ship’s bunks and lay down.
He slept tensely, expecting to be called any moment. He turned and twisted, and, during his wakeful periods, his mind was wholly on the problem of what he would do when he got inside the ship.
He awoke suddenly and saw by his watch that more than five hours had gone by. He dressed with a sense of disaster. He was met by Mardonell.
The Space Patrol officer said, “I didn’t call you, Mr. Hewitt. Because when it became apparent that we weren’t going to get in, I contacted my headquarters. As a result we’ve been getting advice from some of the world’s greatest scientists.” The man was quite pale, as he finished, “Pm afraid it’s no use. All the advice in the world hasn’t helped that drill.”
“What do you mean?”
“Better go take a look.”
The drill was still turning as Hewitt approached. He ordered it shut off, and with his mind almost blank examined the metal wall of the Hope of Man. It was penetrated—he measured it—to a depth of three-quarters of a millimeter.
“But that’s ridiculous,” Hewitt protested. “This metal was cast right here on Earth eight years ago.”
Mardonell said, “We’ve had two extra drills brought up. Diamonds don’t mean a thing to that metal.”
He added, “It’s been calculated that she’ll crash somewhere in the higher foothills of the Rockies. We’ve been able to pin it down pretty accurately, and people have been warned.”
Hewitt said, “What about those aboard? What about—” He stopped. He had been intending to ask, “What about the human race?” He didn’t say it. That was a special madness of his own, which would only irritate other people.
Trembling, he walked over to a porthole of the rescue ship. He guessed they were about fifteen miles above the surface of the earth. Less than two hours before crashing.
When that time limit had dwindled to twenty minutes, Hewitt gave the order to cast off. The rescue ship withdrew slowly from the bigger host, climbing as she went. A little later, Hewitt stood watching with a sick look on his face, as the round ship made its first contact with the earth below, the side of a hill.
At just under a thousand miles an hour, horizontal velocity, it ploughed through the soil, creating a cloud of dust. From where Hewitt and his men watched, no sound was audible, but the impact must have been terrific.
“That did it,” said Hewitt, swallowing, “If anybody was alive aboard, they died at that moment.”
It needed no imagination to picture the colossal concussion. All human beings inside would now be bloody splotches against a floor, ceiling or wall.
Somebody shouted, “She’s through the hill!”
Hewitt said, “My God!”
An improbable thing had happened. The hill, made of rock and packed soil, thicker than a hundred ships like the Hope of Man, was sheared in two. Through a cloud of dust, Hewitt made out the round ship skimming the high valley beyond. She struck the valley floor, and once again there was dust. The machine did not slow; showed no reaction to the impact.
It continued at undiminished speed on into the earth.
THE DUST cleared slowly. There was a hole three hundred feet in diameter, slanting into the far hillside. It began to collapse. Tons of rock crashed down from the upper lip of that cave.
The rescue ship had sunk to a point nearer the ground, and Hewitt heard plainly the thunder of the falling debris.
Gradually, the surface turmoil subsided. The Molly D. landed. Hewitt began numbly to issue orders that would begin the job of fencing in the danger areas. He thought of the problem as one that would be resolved by excavation. The Hope of Man had buried itself. It would have to be dug up.
He had the vague thought that the hard metal of the walls could have withstood the shock, and that the vessel might be reparable.
Rock and soil were still falling when a radio report arrived. A mountain had collapsed fifty miles away. There was a new valley, and somebody had been killed. Three small earthquakes had shaken the neighborhood.
For twenty minutes, the reports piled up. The land was uneasy. Fourteen more earthquakes were recorded. Two of them were the most violent ever known in the affected areas. Great fissures had appeared. The ground jumped and trembled. The last one had taken place four hundred miles from the first; and they all lined up with the course of the Hope of Man.
Abruptly, there came an electrifying message. The round ship had emerged in the desert, and was beginning to climb upward on a long, swift, shallow slant.
Less than three hours later, the salvage ship was again clinging to the side of the larger machine. Its huge magnets twisted stubbornly at the great lock-door. To the half-dozen government scientists who had come aboard, Hewitt said: “It took an hour to turn it one foot. It shouldn’t take more than a hundred and five hours to turn it thirty-five yards. Then, of course, we have the inner door, but that’s a different problem.” He broke off. “Gentlemen, shall we discuss the fantastic thing that has happened?”
The discussion that followed arrived at no conclusion.
HEWITT said, “That does it!”
Through the thick asbesglas, they watched the huge magnet make its final turn on the inner door. As they watched from behind the transparent barrier, a thick metal arm was poked into the airlock, and shoved at the door. After straining with it for several seconds, its operator turned and glanced at Hewitt. The latter turned on his walkie-talkie.
“Come on back inside the ship. We’ll put some air pressure in there. That’ll open the door.”
He had to fight to keep his irritation out of his voice. The outer door had opened without trouble, once all the turns had been made. There seemed no reason why the inner door should not respond in the same way. The Hope of Man was persisting in being recalcitrant.
The captain of the salvage vessel looked doubtful when Hewitt transmitted the order to him. “If she’s stuck,” he objected, “you never can tell just how much pressure it’ll take to open her. Don’t forget we’re holding the two ships together with magnets. It wouldn’t take much to push them apart.”
Hewitt frowned over that. He said finally, “Maybe it won’t take a great deal. And if we do get pushed apart, well, we’ll just have to add more magnets.” He added swiftly, “Or maybe we can build a bulkhead into the lock itself, join the two ships with a steel framework.”
It was decided to try a gradual increase in air pressure. Presently Hewitt was watching the pressure gauge as it slowly crept up. It registered in pounds and atmospheres. At a fraction over ninety-one atmospheres, the pressure started rapidly down. It went down to eighty-six in a few seconds, then steadied, and began to creep up again. The captain barked an order to the engine room, and the gauge stopped rising. The man turned to Hewitt.
“Well, that’s it. At ninety-one atmospheres, the rubber lining began to lose air, and didn’t seal up again till the pressure went down.”
Hewitt shook his head in bewilderment. “I don’t understand it,” he said. “That’s over twelve hundred pounds to the square inch.”
Reluctantly, he radioed for the equipment that would be needed to brace the two ships together. While they waited, they tried several methods of using machinery to push open the door. None of the methods worked. Hewitt was startled, and for the first time let into his foreconsciousness an idea that had been at the back of his mind now for several days.
It had to do with Armand Tellier.
Tellier had been intending to do some experimenting, he recalled, uneasily. Carefully, one by one, he enumerated the fantastic things that had happened. He felt himself turn pale with excitement. On the basis of that first glimmering picture, he estimated that it would take nine hundred atmospheres of pressure to force open the inner lock door of the Hope of Man.
IT REQUIRED just under nine hundred and seventy-eight.
The door swung open grudgingly. Hewitt watched the air gauge, and waited for the needle to race downward. The air should be rushing through the open door, on into the Centauri ship, dissipating its terrific pressure in the enormous cubic area of the bigger machine. It could sweep through like a tornado, destroying everything in its path.
The pressure went down to nine hundred and seventy-three. There it stopped. There it stayed. Beside Hewitt, a government scientist said in a strangled tone, “But what’s happened? It seems to be equalized at an impossible level. How can that be? That’s over thirteen thousand pounds to the square inch.”
Hewitt drew away from the asbesglas barrier. “I’ll have to get a specially designed suit,” he said. “Nothing we have would hold that pressure for an instant.”
It meant going down to Earth. Not that it would take a great deal of time. There were firms capable of building such a suit in two days. But he would have to be present in person to supervise its construction.
As he headed for a landing craft, Hewitt thought, AU I’ve got to do is get aboard, and start the ship back toward Centaurus. I’ll probably have to go along. But that’s immaterial now. It was too late to build more colonizing ships.
He was suddenly confident that the entire unusual affair would be resolved swiftly. He had no premonition.
It was morning at the steel city when he landed. The news of his coming had preceded him; and when he emerged from the spacesuit factory shortly after noon, a group of reporters were waiting for him. Hewitt gave them some crumbs of information, but left them dissatisfied.
As he headed for his own craft, he noticed that several men in uniform were waiting for him. They wore the uniform of the federal police. As Hewitt approached they sauntered casually toward him. Something in their attitude warned him. He turned, and started back toward the factory. A paralyzer beam flashed. He fell, twisting in anguish.
The papers reported that he had “resisted arrest.”
CHAPTER TWO
The Twisted Men
FOR TWENTY-FOUR hours, Hewitt lay in a jail bunk, and thought about incredible things. The confinement seemed to have released his imagination, for his thoughts were on the wild side and partly, at least, untenable. But he calmed down, and presently he was able to write his ideas in logical sequence. He told himself that he did so to clarify his own thinking. He made the following points:
The Hope of Man was not affected by the gravitational forces of Earth. It was moving through the solar system as an independent body.
Coming in from outer space the ship had intersected the path of the earth around the sun. In pursuing its straight course, it had passed through the outer rim of Earth, but it was Earth that moved away from it, not it away from Earth. The tremendous hardness of the metal and the fact that the solid earth offered no obstacle whatever to its movement, suggested that the round ship had enormous mass. Hewitt hesitated at that point. He was beginning to think he might give the account to the press after all. He added: “The density is clearly out of all proportion to any known substance.” He gave the air pressure as evidence. He hinted at matter density almost, though not quite, comparable to that found in the interiors of certain stars. He meant white dwarfs, like Sirius B. He meant neutronium. But now that he was consciously writing for publication, he did not say so.
He had a purpose in mind. It seemed to him that if he made this explanation properly, he would be freed to help in boarding the Hope of Man.
But now he had an unpleasant point to make. For a man who had predicted that the sun would destroy Earth, his next statement was loaded with dynamite—for himself. Nevertheless, he finally wrote firmly:
“If the robot control is responsible for the ship’s return, then it will still be in operation. It will accordingly start edging the Hope of Man over, so that the two bodies wail presently meet again. We cannot reasonably expect that its passage will once more be limited to a shadow surface penetration. The ship may go down to the magma. I need hardly point out that an irresistible hundred-yards-in-diameter body may cause major planetary convulsions.”
On reading that over, he realized it would shock the world. Other people would not take his attitude that, since such a disaster would happen later than the greater catastrophe of the baby Nova, it was a matter for concern because the ship might be destroyed. To them, the danger from the ship, not to it, would be important. Mobs might well try to lynch the owner of the vessel.
Shuddering, Hewitt tore up his account and burned it. He was still shivering at what he considered his narrow escape when his lawyer came. It seemed there would be due process of law. Meanwhile, habeas corpus, bail, freedom. The government, it seemed, wasn’t even certain it had a case against him. Somebody had acted hastily.
Several civil suits had been filed. People were suing him for damage to their property. Somebody had owned the mountain that had become a valley. Nearly a dozen people claimed to have been hurt. Hewitt ordered that all claims should be fought by every device of the law. Then he collected the specially-built spacesuit, and headed once more for the Molly D.
More than an hour was spent in testing. But at last a magnet drew shut the inner door of the Hope of Man. Then the air pressure in the connecting bulkhead was reduced to one atmosphere. Hewitt, arrayed in his new, motor-driven space-suit, was then lifted out of the salvage ship into the bulkhead by a crane.
The door locked tight behind him. Air was again pumped into space. Hewitt watched the suit’s air-pressure gauges carefully as the outside pressure was gradually increased to nine hundred and seventy-three atmospheres. When, after many minutes, the suit showed no signs of buckling, he edged it forward in low gear and gently pushed open the door of the big ship.
A few seconds later he was inside the Hope of Man.
DARKNESS!
The change had come at the instant he rolled into the ship. The difference was startling. From outside, the corridor had looked bright and normal.
He was in a ghastly gray-dark world. Several seconds went by as he peered into the gloom. Slowly, his eyes became accustomed to the dim lighting effect.
Six years had gone by since he had last been aboard the ship. Even in that halfnight, he was struck by a sense of smallness.
He was in a corridor which he knew pointed into the heart of the ship. It was narrower than he remembered it. Not just a little narrower; a lot. It had been a broad arterial channel, especially constructed for large equipment. It was not broad any more.
Just how long it was he couldn’t see. Originally, it had been just under three hundred feet in length. He couldn’t see that far. Ahead, the corridor faded into impenetrable shadow.
It seemed not to have shrunk at all in height. It had been twenty feet high, and it still looked twenty.
But it was five feet wide instead of fifteen. It didn’t look as if it had been torn down and rebuilt. It seemed solid, and, besides, rebuilding was out of the question. The steel framework behind the facade of the wall was an integral part of the skeleton of the ship.
He had to make up his mind, then, whether he would continue into the ship. And there was no doubt of that. With his purposes, he had to.
He paused to close the airlock door. And there he received his second shock.
The door distorted as it moved. That was something else that had not been visible from outside. As he swung it shut, its normal width of twelve feet narrowed to four.
The change was so monstrous that perspiration broke out on his face.
And the first, sharp, tremendous realization was in his mind. But that’s the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction theory effect!
His mind leaped on to an even more staggering thought: Why, that would mean this ship is traveling at near the speed of light.
He rejected the notion utterly. It seemed a meaningless concept.
There must be some other explanation.
CAUTIOUSLY, he started his machine forward on its rubber wheels. The captain’s cabin was on this floor, and that was his first destination.
As he moved ahead, the shadows opened up reluctantly before him. Presently he made out the door of the cabin. When he was ten feet from it, he was able to see the ramp in the distance beyond.
The reappearance of things he remembered relieved him. What was more important, they seemed to be at just about the right distance. First the airlock, then the captain’s cabin, then the ramp.
The corridor opened out at the ramp, then narrowed again; and in the distance beyond was the second airlock.
He was scarcely aware of how completely the others had let him take control of rescue operations. In a way, it was natural enough. The Molly D. was a commercial salvage vessel, which had been commandeered by the Space Patrol. Now that Hewitt was aboard, the representative of the Patrol, Lieutenant Commander Mardonell, had assumed the role of observer. And the permanent captain of the vessel took instructions, as a matter of course, from the man paying the bills.
More than an hour later, the giant magnet had turned the round lock-door just a little over one foot. Pale, tense and astounded, Hewitt held counsel with the two officers.
The altimeter of the Molly D. showed ninety-one miles. Lieutenant Commander Mardonell made the decisive comment about that. “We’ve come down about nine miles in sixty-eight minutes. At that rate we’ll strike some high landmark in ten hours.”
It was evident that it would take much longer than that to unscrew the thirty-five yards of thread on the lock-door at one foot per hour.
Hewitt considered the situation angrily. He still thought of this whole boarding problem as a minor affair, an irritation. “We’ll have to get a big drill,” he said. “Cut through the wall.”
He radioed for one to be sent ahead. But, even with the full authority of the Space Patrol behind him, two and a half hours went by before it was in position. Hewitt gave the order to start the powerful drill motor. He left instructions: “Call me when we’re about to penetrate.”
He had been progressively aware of exhaustion, as much mental as physical. He retreated to one of the ship’s bunks and lay down.
He slept tensely, expecting to be called any moment. He turned and twisted, and, during his wakeful periods, his mind was wholly on the problem of what he would do when he got inside the ship.
He awoke suddenly and saw by his watch that more than five hours had gone by. He dressed with a sense of disaster. He was met by Mardonell.
The Space Patrol officer said, “I didn’t call you, Mr. Hewitt. Because when it became apparent that we weren’t going to get in, I contacted my headquarters. As a result we’ve been getting advice from some of the world’s greatest scientists.” The man was quite pale, as he finished, “Pm afraid it’s no use. All the advice in the world hasn’t helped that drill.”
“What do you mean?”
“Better go take a look.”
The drill was still turning as Hewitt approached. He ordered it shut off, and with his mind almost blank examined the metal wall of the Hope of Man. It was penetrated—he measured it—to a depth of three-quarters of a millimeter.
“But that’s ridiculous,” Hewitt protested. “This metal was cast right here on Earth eight years ago.”
Mardonell said, “We’ve had two extra drills brought up. Diamonds don’t mean a thing to that metal.”
He added, “It’s been calculated that she’ll crash somewhere in the higher foothills of the Rockies. We’ve been able to pin it down pretty accurately, and people have been warned.”
Hewitt said, “What about those aboard? What about—” He stopped. He had been intending to ask, “What about the human race?” He didn’t say it. That was a special madness of his own, which would only irritate other people.
Trembling, he walked over to a porthole of the rescue ship. He guessed they were about fifteen miles above the surface of the earth. Less than two hours before crashing.
When that time limit had dwindled to twenty minutes, Hewitt gave the order to cast off. The rescue ship withdrew slowly from the bigger host, climbing as she went. A little later, Hewitt stood watching with a sick look on his face, as the round ship made its first contact with the earth below, the side of a hill.
At just under a thousand miles an hour, horizontal velocity, it ploughed through the soil, creating a cloud of dust. From where Hewitt and his men watched, no sound was audible, but the impact must have been terrific.
“That did it,” said Hewitt, swallowing, “If anybody was alive aboard, they died at that moment.”
It needed no imagination to picture the colossal concussion. All human beings inside would now be bloody splotches against a floor, ceiling or wall.
Somebody shouted, “She’s through the hill!”
Hewitt said, “My God!”
An improbable thing had happened. The hill, made of rock and packed soil, thicker than a hundred ships like the Hope of Man, was sheared in two. Through a cloud of dust, Hewitt made out the round ship skimming the high valley beyond. She struck the valley floor, and once again there was dust. The machine did not slow; showed no reaction to the impact.
It continued at undiminished speed on into the earth.
THE DUST cleared slowly. There was a hole three hundred feet in diameter, slanting into the far hillside. It began to collapse. Tons of rock crashed down from the upper lip of that cave.
The rescue ship had sunk to a point nearer the ground, and Hewitt heard plainly the thunder of the falling debris.
Gradually, the surface turmoil subsided. The Molly D. landed. Hewitt began numbly to issue orders that would begin the job of fencing in the danger areas. He thought of the problem as one that would be resolved by excavation. The Hope of Man had buried itself. It would have to be dug up.
He had the vague thought that the hard metal of the walls could have withstood the shock, and that the vessel might be reparable.
Rock and soil were still falling when a radio report arrived. A mountain had collapsed fifty miles away. There was a new valley, and somebody had been killed. Three small earthquakes had shaken the neighborhood.
For twenty minutes, the reports piled up. The land was uneasy. Fourteen more earthquakes were recorded. Two of them were the most violent ever known in the affected areas. Great fissures had appeared. The ground jumped and trembled. The last one had taken place four hundred miles from the first; and they all lined up with the course of the Hope of Man.
Abruptly, there came an electrifying message. The round ship had emerged in the desert, and was beginning to climb upward on a long, swift, shallow slant.
Less than three hours later, the salvage ship was again clinging to the side of the larger machine. Its huge magnets twisted stubbornly at the great lock-door. To the half-dozen government scientists who had come aboard, Hewitt said: “It took an hour to turn it one foot. It shouldn’t take more than a hundred and five hours to turn it thirty-five yards. Then, of course, we have the inner door, but that’s a different problem.” He broke off. “Gentlemen, shall we discuss the fantastic thing that has happened?”
The discussion that followed arrived at no conclusion.
HEWITT said, “That does it!”
Through the thick asbesglas, they watched the huge magnet make its final turn on the inner door. As they watched from behind the transparent barrier, a thick metal arm was poked into the airlock, and shoved at the door. After straining with it for several seconds, its operator turned and glanced at Hewitt. The latter turned on his walkie-talkie.
“Come on back inside the ship. We’ll put some air pressure in there. That’ll open the door.”
He had to fight to keep his irritation out of his voice. The outer door had opened without trouble, once all the turns had been made. There seemed no reason why the inner door should not respond in the same way. The Hope of Man was persisting in being recalcitrant.
The captain of the salvage vessel looked doubtful when Hewitt transmitted the order to him. “If she’s stuck,” he objected, “you never can tell just how much pressure it’ll take to open her. Don’t forget we’re holding the two ships together with magnets. It wouldn’t take much to push them apart.”
Hewitt frowned over that. He said finally, “Maybe it won’t take a great deal. And if we do get pushed apart, well, we’ll just have to add more magnets.” He added swiftly, “Or maybe we can build a bulkhead into the lock itself, join the two ships with a steel framework.”
It was decided to try a gradual increase in air pressure. Presently Hewitt was watching the pressure gauge as it slowly crept up. It registered in pounds and atmospheres. At a fraction over ninety-one atmospheres, the pressure started rapidly down. It went down to eighty-six in a few seconds, then steadied, and began to creep up again. The captain barked an order to the engine room, and the gauge stopped rising. The man turned to Hewitt.
“Well, that’s it. At ninety-one atmospheres, the rubber lining began to lose air, and didn’t seal up again till the pressure went down.”
Hewitt shook his head in bewilderment. “I don’t understand it,” he said. “That’s over twelve hundred pounds to the square inch.”
Reluctantly, he radioed for the equipment that would be needed to brace the two ships together. While they waited, they tried several methods of using machinery to push open the door. None of the methods worked. Hewitt was startled, and for the first time let into his foreconsciousness an idea that had been at the back of his mind now for several days.
It had to do with Armand Tellier.
Tellier had been intending to do some experimenting, he recalled, uneasily. Carefully, one by one, he enumerated the fantastic things that had happened. He felt himself turn pale with excitement. On the basis of that first glimmering picture, he estimated that it would take nine hundred atmospheres of pressure to force open the inner lock door of the Hope of Man.
IT REQUIRED just under nine hundred and seventy-eight.
The door swung open grudgingly. Hewitt watched the air gauge, and waited for the needle to race downward. The air should be rushing through the open door, on into the Centauri ship, dissipating its terrific pressure in the enormous cubic area of the bigger machine. It could sweep through like a tornado, destroying everything in its path.
The pressure went down to nine hundred and seventy-three. There it stopped. There it stayed. Beside Hewitt, a government scientist said in a strangled tone, “But what’s happened? It seems to be equalized at an impossible level. How can that be? That’s over thirteen thousand pounds to the square inch.”
Hewitt drew away from the asbesglas barrier. “I’ll have to get a specially designed suit,” he said. “Nothing we have would hold that pressure for an instant.”
It meant going down to Earth. Not that it would take a great deal of time. There were firms capable of building such a suit in two days. But he would have to be present in person to supervise its construction.
As he headed for a landing craft, Hewitt thought, AU I’ve got to do is get aboard, and start the ship back toward Centaurus. I’ll probably have to go along. But that’s immaterial now. It was too late to build more colonizing ships.
He was suddenly confident that the entire unusual affair would be resolved swiftly. He had no premonition.
It was morning at the steel city when he landed. The news of his coming had preceded him; and when he emerged from the spacesuit factory shortly after noon, a group of reporters were waiting for him. Hewitt gave them some crumbs of information, but left them dissatisfied.
As he headed for his own craft, he noticed that several men in uniform were waiting for him. They wore the uniform of the federal police. As Hewitt approached they sauntered casually toward him. Something in their attitude warned him. He turned, and started back toward the factory. A paralyzer beam flashed. He fell, twisting in anguish.
The papers reported that he had “resisted arrest.”
CHAPTER TWO
The Twisted Men
FOR TWENTY-FOUR hours, Hewitt lay in a jail bunk, and thought about incredible things. The confinement seemed to have released his imagination, for his thoughts were on the wild side and partly, at least, untenable. But he calmed down, and presently he was able to write his ideas in logical sequence. He told himself that he did so to clarify his own thinking. He made the following points:
The Hope of Man was not affected by the gravitational forces of Earth. It was moving through the solar system as an independent body.
Coming in from outer space the ship had intersected the path of the earth around the sun. In pursuing its straight course, it had passed through the outer rim of Earth, but it was Earth that moved away from it, not it away from Earth. The tremendous hardness of the metal and the fact that the solid earth offered no obstacle whatever to its movement, suggested that the round ship had enormous mass. Hewitt hesitated at that point. He was beginning to think he might give the account to the press after all. He added: “The density is clearly out of all proportion to any known substance.” He gave the air pressure as evidence. He hinted at matter density almost, though not quite, comparable to that found in the interiors of certain stars. He meant white dwarfs, like Sirius B. He meant neutronium. But now that he was consciously writing for publication, he did not say so.
He had a purpose in mind. It seemed to him that if he made this explanation properly, he would be freed to help in boarding the Hope of Man.
But now he had an unpleasant point to make. For a man who had predicted that the sun would destroy Earth, his next statement was loaded with dynamite—for himself. Nevertheless, he finally wrote firmly:
“If the robot control is responsible for the ship’s return, then it will still be in operation. It will accordingly start edging the Hope of Man over, so that the two bodies wail presently meet again. We cannot reasonably expect that its passage will once more be limited to a shadow surface penetration. The ship may go down to the magma. I need hardly point out that an irresistible hundred-yards-in-diameter body may cause major planetary convulsions.”
On reading that over, he realized it would shock the world. Other people would not take his attitude that, since such a disaster would happen later than the greater catastrophe of the baby Nova, it was a matter for concern because the ship might be destroyed. To them, the danger from the ship, not to it, would be important. Mobs might well try to lynch the owner of the vessel.
Shuddering, Hewitt tore up his account and burned it. He was still shivering at what he considered his narrow escape when his lawyer came. It seemed there would be due process of law. Meanwhile, habeas corpus, bail, freedom. The government, it seemed, wasn’t even certain it had a case against him. Somebody had acted hastily.
Several civil suits had been filed. People were suing him for damage to their property. Somebody had owned the mountain that had become a valley. Nearly a dozen people claimed to have been hurt. Hewitt ordered that all claims should be fought by every device of the law. Then he collected the specially-built spacesuit, and headed once more for the Molly D.
More than an hour was spent in testing. But at last a magnet drew shut the inner door of the Hope of Man. Then the air pressure in the connecting bulkhead was reduced to one atmosphere. Hewitt, arrayed in his new, motor-driven space-suit, was then lifted out of the salvage ship into the bulkhead by a crane.
The door locked tight behind him. Air was again pumped into space. Hewitt watched the suit’s air-pressure gauges carefully as the outside pressure was gradually increased to nine hundred and seventy-three atmospheres. When, after many minutes, the suit showed no signs of buckling, he edged it forward in low gear and gently pushed open the door of the big ship.
A few seconds later he was inside the Hope of Man.
DARKNESS!
The change had come at the instant he rolled into the ship. The difference was startling. From outside, the corridor had looked bright and normal.
He was in a ghastly gray-dark world. Several seconds went by as he peered into the gloom. Slowly, his eyes became accustomed to the dim lighting effect.
Six years had gone by since he had last been aboard the ship. Even in that halfnight, he was struck by a sense of smallness.
He was in a corridor which he knew pointed into the heart of the ship. It was narrower than he remembered it. Not just a little narrower; a lot. It had been a broad arterial channel, especially constructed for large equipment. It was not broad any more.
Just how long it was he couldn’t see. Originally, it had been just under three hundred feet in length. He couldn’t see that far. Ahead, the corridor faded into impenetrable shadow.
It seemed not to have shrunk at all in height. It had been twenty feet high, and it still looked twenty.
But it was five feet wide instead of fifteen. It didn’t look as if it had been torn down and rebuilt. It seemed solid, and, besides, rebuilding was out of the question. The steel framework behind the facade of the wall was an integral part of the skeleton of the ship.
He had to make up his mind, then, whether he would continue into the ship. And there was no doubt of that. With his purposes, he had to.
He paused to close the airlock door. And there he received his second shock.
The door distorted as it moved. That was something else that had not been visible from outside. As he swung it shut, its normal width of twelve feet narrowed to four.
The change was so monstrous that perspiration broke out on his face.
And the first, sharp, tremendous realization was in his mind. But that’s the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction theory effect!
His mind leaped on to an even more staggering thought: Why, that would mean this ship is traveling at near the speed of light.
He rejected the notion utterly. It seemed a meaningless concept.
There must be some other explanation.
CAUTIOUSLY, he started his machine forward on its rubber wheels. The captain’s cabin was on this floor, and that was his first destination.
As he moved ahead, the shadows opened up reluctantly before him. Presently he made out the door of the cabin. When he was ten feet from it, he was able to see the ramp in the distance beyond.
The reappearance of things he remembered relieved him. What was more important, they seemed to be at just about the right distance. First the airlock, then the captain’s cabin, then the ramp.
The corridor opened out at the ramp, then narrowed again; and in the distance beyond was the second airlock.
