Читать книгу The Cosmic Crusaders: The Golden Amazon Saga, Book Eight - John Russell Fearn - Страница 7

CHAPTER TWO

FAREWELL TO EARTH

Arriving at the hangar, the Amazon found both Abna and Viona hard at work on final preparations for departure. Whilst Abna was checking the atomic power plant and fourth-dimensional switchboard, Viona was attending to the hundred and one details concern­ing provisions, clothing, air supply, weapon ammunition, and so forth.

“Everything fixed?” Viona asked, as her mother entered the big control room.

“Yes, everything—and the goodbyes have been said. Your father busy on the power unit?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Then I’d better do my part of the work and get the course mapped out.”

The Amazon went to work, walking into the navigation chamber adjacent to the control room. Here there loomed all the scientific paraphernalia and computers necessary to make dead certain of any predicted path through space. Here were mathe­matical machines of incredible accu­racy, designed to weigh up every possible contingency in the compli­cated equational formula of traveling between dimensions.

For an hour the Amazon brooded over the calculations she was working out, checking the results with the computers. When at last she had come to the end of her maze of figur­ing she seemed satisfied. The sound of footsteps on the metal floor caused her to turn.

The gigantic figure of Abna entered, his handsome face smudged with grease from his activities.

“Everything in order,” he announced. “Near as I can estimate we’ll need twenty copper disintegrative blocks for this trip, which is as much as we can carry without them interacting with each other. After that we’ll have to look elsewhere for fresh sup­plies. The twenty blocks allow enough and to spare to make the trip to Alpha Centauri and wherever we go next.”

The Amazon figured quickly and then looked surprised. “But twenty blocks is a tremendous number, Abna! In free space, once we’ve achieved our required velocity, we’ll move at a constant speed without the power plant.”

“I’m aware of it, but don’t overlook that the period of acceleration will be enormously draining of power, due to our having to quickly build up velocity to that approaching light. Then will come the leap into four-dimensional space. That will be another tremendous drain on the power supply. Then again, we do not know that space approaching Alpha Centauri will be absolutely clear. There may be the colossal hulks of burned-out suns to fight against, their gravities infinitely greater than anything we have ever encountered before. There are dozens of unknown factors, hence the precautions.”

The Amazon nodded. “Better to be safe than sorry,” she agreed. “As to future copper supplies, we ought to be able to find copper-bearing Systems somewhere with which to replenish. I imagine that copper is about one of the most prolific elements throughout the Universe.”

Abna crossed to the charting console and studied the course. In a matter of minutes his agile brain had linked the equations in place and he patted the Amazon’s softly molded arm.

“Good girl! We’ll make a space pilot of you yet!”

Her violet eyes smoldered. “For your information, Abna of Jupiter, let me tell you—”

“You needn’t,” Abna grinned. “You built the Ultra and have flown it by accident into the deeps! Yes, I know—but that was an enforced journey and more or less of an accident. This, let us hope, will be in­teresting even if the initial buildup in acceleration is crushing.”

He said no more. Leaving the navigation chamber, he set himself the task of checking over the multi-switchboards, a job which took him the rest of the day. Indeed, with only short intervals between, the three worked ceaselessly on their prepara­tions right up to the time of departure, which was ten p.m. the following evening. Then, in the mellow summer dusk, they arrived at the hangar, ready attired in their space clothes—light tunics for Abna and Viona, and skin-fitting black tights for the Ama­zon, relieved by the single solid gold belt about her slender waist.

“I have the feeling,” the Amazon remarked, as they all three stood in the big airlock and watched the hangar around them automatically fold itself away into sections, “that we’re looking our last on Earth for a very, very long time to come.”

“A most cheerful note on which to depart,” Abna commented.

“True, nevertheless. We’ll go forward, Abna, once we’ve reached Alpha—not backward.”

There was silence for a moment. The only sound on the still summer evening air came from the city itself—a deep, resonant throb of industry. Here and there the lights were auto­matically coming up. Away to the east an Earth-Mars space liner was just coming in, its portholes glowing warmly.

“All right.” Abna said at last, his voice quiet, “let’s be on our way.”

The Amazon and Viona went ahead of him into the control room. Abna pulled over the switch that sealed the airlock, then he gave a final glance over the instruments.

“We know exactly what we’re doing?” he asked.

“Certainly,” the Amazon assented. “Everything is to be automatic until the first copper block has spent itself. By that time we ought to be beyond the orbit of Pluto, and really well launched on our journey. Then the automatic controls will switch the ship into the fourth dimension—during which time we might as well relax in sleep, since there’ll be nothing to see—then we will awaken when we drop back into normal space.”

“Correct,” Abna agreed. “Let’s get settled.”

Without any fuss they went into a compartment in the center of the vessel where they settled themselves on powerfully sprung beds, strapping themselves down so that, as acceleration finally ceased, they would not float away from their moorings.

Beside each bed was a bank of controls, as compactly contained as though on a typewriter keyboard. By this means they could each do their respective parts in controlling the mighty vessel, the slave switchboards being connected to the masters in the con­trol room.

Abna, lying calmly with his forearms in the movable rests, held his fingertips above the buttons and looked at the chronometer in the ceiling.

“Fifteen seconds to go,” he said, and moved the button which started up the power plant. Immediately a dull whining pervaded the sealed-in silence.

“Six,” Abna said presently. “Five—four—three—two—one—”

It was the Amazon’s hand that moved next, closing the switch that transferred the atomic power to the recoil jets. Instantly the vast space machine began to rise—traveling diagonally as far as the trio was concerned—since the internal chambers were all built on universal mountings. Externally, the Ultra was almost at the vertical, its rear tubes blazing an inconceivable holocaust of expanding fire and poisonous gases.

Faster and faster still the machine cleaved the dusk of the evening, hurtling upwards into the unclouded sky, leaving Earth as a titanic, lighted patchwork below. The three on the pressure beds absorbed the awful sensation calmly, accustomed to it from their many space journeys in the past. And in any case, nothing like the maximum velocity had yet been achieved.

Switches clicked under Viona’s slim fingers. Instantly the Ultra gave a mighty surge. Here within the insu­lated walls there was no sound, but outside the awful roar of the Ultra’s departure into space was heard for over two hundred miles, a cleaving channel of scattering fire defining the track into the upper heavens.

Faster and yet faster, each move­ment of a relay piling speed upon speed, velocity upon velocity. Even when the full depth of the Earth’s atmospheric belt had been penetrated—at which point acceleration was usu­ally slackened off—the power was still increased. Motionless, beginning now to feel the terrible dragging weight of acceleration upon them, the three moved their buttons in the correct sequences, watching meanwhile the fantastic gyrations of the velocity readings as miles per second flashed into hundreds, thousands, and tens of thousands of miles per second. They were traveling now at a prodigious velocity, and with every moment it was still increasing.

They were beyond the orbit of the Moon and flashing onward toward the orbit of Mars. Still the speed increased. Switches clicked. Hearts labored. Breathing became a vast effort, herculean though the three were in strength.… The metal walls around them were spin­ning in a blaze of lights that slowly faded as they deliberately let themselves slip into unconsciousness.

With nothing to guide it in the way of a human hand, the Ultra thereafter flashed onwards with awful velocity, the automatic controls functioning perfectly under the guidance of computers. The three on their sprung beds remained motionless, their fore­arms still clamped to the rests above the slave stitches, a precaution so that they might, upon return to conscious­ness, be able to handle the switches if at all possible. Without the rests, dragging weight could have made their arms useless and their hands mere dead lumps of clay.

Beyond Mars’ orbit, still with the velocity mounting. Then onwards past the asteroids, avoiding all danger by sweeping with prodigious speed far above the ecliptic plane of that deadly ‘minefield’ of floating bodies, and so out to the territory occupied by gigantic Jupiter. Here the automatic repulsion equipment came into action and kept the hurtling vessel clear of the deadly drag of the monster’s gravity.

Within a matter of minutes, so unbelievable was the speed which had now been attained, Jupiter was reced­ing into the gulf arid. Superb Saturn was ahead. Non-stop, onwards and outwards, commencing now to approximate the incredible speed of light itself—186,000 miles a second.

The orbits of the outer worlds were passed. Saturn—Uranus—Neptune—Pluto—. The three remained unconscious, pressed down into a state ap­proximating that of suspended animation, scarcely breathing, their hearts laboring under the load of accelera­tion…then the ship was infused with the energy warp that diverted it into the fourth dimension. And so into the deeps beyond Pluto, into those vast, incomprehensible spaces, the graveyard realm of comets and leftover materials from the birth of the Solar System. Then deeper into the space yawning between the edge of the Solar System and far-flung Alpha Centauri. And as yet only half of the copper block in the power unit had been consumed into atomic power.

The automatic controls functioned flawlessly, controlled by the computers that had been pre-programmed. After some four light years—as measured in the normal three-dimensional universe—had been traversed, the Ultra dropped back into normal space. Its speed was now the same as it had been just before the dimensional transition—a fraction below the speed of light. Then the forward rockets began firing, gradually slowing their speed before the Alpha system would be reached.

Abna stirred slowly, and imme­diately he did so, he felt his pulses racing as life began to surge through him. For a long moment he lay look­ing at the softly glowing yellow lights in the curved metal ceiling overhead, then moving his gaze he assessed the situation.

Nearby, in their sprung beds, the Amazon and Viona were also slowly recovering consciousness and, like Abna, their bodies were strained upwards now against the withholding straps. No longer was acceleration or deceleration pinning them down: that had ceased and, a constant velocity having been attained, everything had become weightless.

Moving with featherweight ease, Abna unbuckled the straps from about him and literally floated from his bed to the switchboard. Here he pressed a button and there gradually came into being the artificial gravity that made movement normal. This done, Abna moved to the observation port and gazed steadily out into space upon the great backdrop of the First Galaxy—the Milky Way—and ahead and to one side of them, so flawlessly had the course been mapped, there lay the glimmer­ing point of Alpha Centauri. Abna looked at it for a long time, until at length he was able to determine that Alpha was not one point but two. The first evidence of its binary nature was becoming evident, which indicated their enormous distance from Earth.

“How are we making out?” Abna turned as the Amazon came to his side. rubbing her arms briskly to re­store long-impeded circulation.

“Pretty well from the look of things. I haven’t checked on the instruments yet, but we’re plainly moving in normal space and approaching our destination.”

Abna turned to the main computer, and for a moment or two busied himself with feeding readings into it. “Twenty thousand billion miles.” Abna said, turning. “We are now just over four light years away from Earth. Which means we will soon be entering the Alphan system.”

Viona and the Amazon nodded silently, digesting the incredible facts of their accomplishment.

“The best thing will be a meal, a check-up telescopically, and then continue onwards,” Abna decided—and this was the plan they adopted.

Abna made a routine check of the power plant while the Amazon again checked the figures for the course. Everything seemed to be in order and, surprisingly enough, space ahead was completely empty of stray bodies. Even the super-radar system, flashing out to mil­lions of miles ahead of their position, did not rebound from any object. It looked as though the remaining gulf separating them from Alpha Centauri was indeed free of all dangerous or damaging objects.

Viona took over the task of studying Alpha through the telescopic equipment, securing a view of the binary closer than any ever known before. The absolute separateness of Alpha and Proxima was now clearly marked. But this was by no means enough for Viona. She switched on the stereo­scopic apparatus and studied the result intently.

“What,” she asked her father, “do you make of this?”

Abna came over to her and after a momentary study of the spectro-screen he smiled in satisfaction. The most dominant color element in Alpha and Proxima was green. Bright, clear cut, emerald green.

“Copper!” Abna exclaimed. “In the gaseous state. It is therefore a fore­gone conclusion that any planets of Alpha must also possess copper in the solidified state. Like father, like son.”

“No sign of any planets yet,” Viona commented. “Probably too early to expect it, though.”