Читать книгу Daughter of the Amazon: The Golden Amazon Saga, Book Five - John Russell Fearn - Страница 7

CHAPTER TWO

SUPER-SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH

A switch opened the roof and she settled in the scanning chair and peered through the eyepiece. An adjustment of the focussing screw brought the hosts of heaven leap­ing into relief, a picture such as she might have seen anywhere in space ex­cept that in this case the atmosphere prevented the pin-sharp brilliance exist­ing in the void.

She searched far out to the remote spaces in the region of the North Star, searching out beyond Orion, the Coal­-Sack, and the Black Hole of Cygnus.

Then she saw it—a roughly-formed circle of utter darkness in which not a single star or nebula gleamed. Beneath her fingers a switch clicked and the nearer-focus control came into operation. Immediately the stars on the edge of the darkness vanished. In all her ex­perience she had never seen anything quite so black. There was not the faintest trace of radiating streaks, not even the ghost of nebulous dust. And the one thought hammering in her mind was that it had no conceivable right to be there.

Getting to her feet, she switched on the observatory lights, and going to the filing cabinet, she pressed a button. A series of slides, illuminated from the back, paraded before her vision—photographs of the cosmos, which she had made in her sell-imposed task of photographing the entire known Universe.

When she came to plate sixteen she removed it from its rack and studied it carefully. It showed exactly the same portion of heavens at which she had just been looking. It had been origin­ally photographed a year ago and at that time the stars were numerous. Now there was only the Darkness, as yet only a smudge on the face of infinity, but one day—

She crossed to the radio-phone and switched it through to the observatory at Mount Wilson, California.

“Violet Ray Brant here,” she said as a voice responded. “What do you make of the queer dark patch in section eight of the Northern Hemisphere?”

“I’m glad you brought up the matter, Miss Brant,” the official in charge answered. “I was thinking of contacting you about it. All spaceport executives have been asked to have their pilots make a check on the phenomenon. Not that I expect much, since even if they travelled out as far as Pluto—which they don’t—it would not bring them measurably any nearer this queer smudge.”

“When did it commence to be seen?” the Amazon asked.

“About a week ago. It was only a speck at first, blotting out two stars. Since then it has grown considerably. When we take into account our distance from it, I am pretty well shocked when I think how big it must be. And since it is growing, it is obviously coming nearer.”

The Amazon said: “Thank you for your information. I’ll see what I can discover and let you know.”

She returned to the telescope and for a while she gazed through it. Then she went to a bank of instruments and switches on an apparatus that, as the thermopile can measure heat from the surface of the Moon, gave a reading of distant space. The apparatus incorporated special fourth-dimensional processes, so that the outflowing detector-wave from the instrument was able to hurdle the void at speeds many times in excess of the speed of light.

Now and again the needle jolted and registered maximum in heat as the nearer stars were reached—then it dropped again to the zero reading of space. Hours passed. The distance must be stupendous. Still the Amazon waited, but to her amazement it was five-and-a-half hours before she got the reaction she wanted. The read­ings were at zero in every direction. Heat, light, electromagnetic energy—none of these things registered.

Her readings complete, the Amazon made a note of each one and then went back into the house to study them. She settled down and worked through the night, hardly stirring until 7:30 the following morning. Then she picked up the visiphone. The face of Chris Wilson, speaking from his home, appeared in the scanning-plate.

“Oh, hello, Vi! I was just leaving for work—”

“Chris, I’ve made a most disturbing discovery,” the Amazon interrupted him. “You recall that message you showed me about a dark smudge in space?”

“Why, of course. But you said—”

“Since then I’ve looked into it, and my conclusion is that unless I can work out something in the meantime, the whole Universe is going to be blotted out!’”

“What!” Chris exclaimed. “Blotted out? How do you mean? Destroyed?”

“No. That would be merciful. Something much worse. Matter will remain, but light and heat and all forms of radiation will become things of the past.”

“I don’t understand, Vi.”

“Come to my place right away,” she said. “I want to show you what I’ve discovered.”

“I’ll come immediately.”

The Amazon summoned one of her telepathic-responsive robots. It laid a meal and tidied the room. By the time Chris had arrived, he found the Amazon had changed into a sweeping gown instead of her coveralls, looking what she was—a superbly beautiful woman.

“Sorry to drag you from your work,” she apolo­gized, as they settled down and the robot attended to the refreshment, “but as the head of the Space Line, as far as Earth is concerned, you should know the facts. I am not going to broadcast them to the world as yet. Time enough to do that if my efforts to find a way round the difficulty should fail.”

“Fail?” Chris repeated, surprised. “I never knew you to admit such a possibility before. You, who created a sun when our own was destroyed; you who can destroy matter and build it up again—”

“Chris, no menace or difficulty I have fought before equals this one. There exists in the depths of space—inconceiv­ably far away as yet—an ever-growing patch of non-space-time.”

“What is that?” Chris asked. “Space is space, isn’t it, no matter how you look at it?”

“Space is a loose term, Chris. The early scientists used to think that space was actually a medium in which radiation in all its forms could move. Without ether-of-space, as Eddington called it, there would be a total vacuum with no power to transmit radiation. It used to be thought that because of ether we see the stars by their light-waves, we feel the heat of the sun as his radiations are carried to us, and we hear radio, all because of the ether medium. Modern science subsequently showed that electromagnetic waves did not require any ether medium for their propagation. But they do require what we might call the fabric of space-time itself. Des­troy that and we are alone indeed.”

“You mean it can be destroyed?”

“I mean,” the Amazon answered grim­ly, “that it is being destroyed. That is the meaning of that Smudge—as I will call it—out in infinity. How it came into being I don’t know, but I do know that it is growing rapidly, expanding like an explosion, and at a speed greater than light itself. As it travels, all light and heat ceases. Stars which have been engulfed in it are giving no light or heat.”

“Maybe they’ve been destroyed?”

“No. The mass detectors, which oper­ate by displacement of bulk, show they are still there.”

There was silence for a moment, and it was an uncomfortable one as far as Chris was concerned. Many a time in the past when a particular danger had threatened, he had discussed it first with the superwoman, just as he was doing now, but he had always found her confident of mastering the situation. It was a disturbing change to find her brows notched in uneasy thought and the coffee forgotten at her side.

“It may go away as strangely as it was born,” Chris suggested, but the Amazon shook her head.

“Things born in space do not go away like that, Chris. They grow. In the end, if space-time itself is wiped out, it will mean that all the hosts of the universe will exist in a silent, utterly cold tomb in which no light waves, no heat waves—nothing can ever move. Can you im­agine Earth like that? Absolute extinc­tion of life because it cannot see or keep warm. That is what it amounts to.”

“How long will it take to get here—this Dark?”

“As yet I haven’t worked it out. I can do so in thirty minutes on the computer.”

They went into the observatory, and while the Amazon worked with the mathematical instruments Chris looked at a film recording the Amazon had made the previous night. He saw for himself the awe-inspir­ing sight of an island of night amidst the blaze of the stars.

“Three years—maybe more,” the Amazon said finally. “It all depends whether its faster-than-light acceleration continues to increase exponentially, or whether it reaches an optimum speed and remains constant. If its present acceleration is maintained, then three years will see Earth blacked out—and to try and escape it by flying to other worlds will not do any good, since they too will succumb until all the universe is dark and dead.”

“But Vi, a thing as gigantic as this couldn’t just happen. It upsets all known laws.”

The Amazon was silent for a moment or two, then at length she made up her mind.

“I’m going to take a look at that Dark at close quarters,” she said. “Teles­copically I cannot sum it up. Its dis­tance is so colossal that even though I travelled at the speed of light, I’d be several years reaching it.”

“Then how can you reach it?”

“I will use my dissembly trans­portation method—dissemble my body and recreate it in space near enough to the Dark to study it. My prototype apparatus was limited to the speed of light, but since then I have modified it to operate through the fourth dimension. By that means I can foreshorten space and transmit myself many times faster than light if need be.”

Chris shrugged. “You’re talking way above my head, Vi. I shall have to leave it to you. Just let me know what you discover, and if there is anything I can do to help.…”

“Hardly.” the Amazon said, smiling drily. “If this problem taxes even me, haw do you hope to grapple with it?”

Chris did not respond. It was not the first time the Amazon had made him realize that compared to her, his brain was only equal to that of a new-born infant.