Part 3

I said, “There was a red ray from the little building. The projectile seemed to follow it.”

“Exactly,” he exclaimed. “That was the Elton Beta ray. It is flung straight out, whereas the Alpha ray is circular. The Beta is a stream of particles moving at over four hundred thousand miles a second. More than twice the speed of light!”

He chuckled. “When they discovered that, Leonard, the Einstein theories held good no longer. The ray bombarded and passed through the electric wall of the room, and the projectile went with it, drawn by it, sucked along by the inherent force of the flying whirlpools. The projectile with its infinitely greater mass than the mass of the flying particles of the ray, picked up speed slowly. But its density was lessening.

“As it gained velocity, it lost density. Everything does that, Leonard. I intensified the rapidity of the changes, as I told you. We shall take it slower. Hours, for what you saw in minutes.”

He tossed away his cigarro and stood up over the instrument table. “When we start, Leonard, here is exactly what will happen. Our gravity will be cut off. Not wholly, I have only gone to extremes in describing the theory.

“With a lessened attraction from the earth, the moon will draw us. And passing it, some other planet will draw us onward. And later, the stars themselves.”

He indicated his switches. “I can make the bow or the stern, or one side or the other, attractive or repulsive to whatever body may be nearest. And thus, in a measure, navigate. But that, Leonard, will be necessary for a few hours only, until we are well out beyond the stars.”

He said it quite quietly. But I gasped. “Beyond the stars . . . in a few hours?”

“Yes,” he said. “In our case, differing from my experiment with the model, we carry the Elton Beta ray, the ‘red ray,’ with us. The gravity principle we use only at the start, to avoid a possible collision. With the red ray preceding us, we will follow it. Ultimately at four hundred thousand miles a second.

“But the source of the ray, _being with us_, will give the ray constant acceleration, which we in turn will attain. Thus an endless chain of acceleration, you see? And by this I hope to reach the high speeds necessary. We are going very far, Leonard.”

“That model,” I said, “grew larger. It spread—or did I fancy it?—over all the sky.”

He smiled again. “I have not much left to tell you, Leonard. But what there is—it is the simplest of all, yet the most astounding.”

Jim’s voice interrupted us. “We’ve finished, Dr. Weatherby. Everything is aboard. It’s nearly dawn. How about starting?”

* * * * *

The dawn had not yet come when we started. Dr. Weatherby’s workmen were none of them in evidence. He had sent them away a few days before. They did not know his purpose with this vehicle; it was thought among them that he was making some attempt to go to the moon. It was not a startling adventure. It caused very little comment, for since Elton’s discovery many such projects had been undertaken, though all had not been successful.

Dr. Weatherby’s activities occasioned a few daily remarks from the National Broadcasters of News, but little else.

There was, however, one of Dr. Weatherby’s assistants whom he trusted with all his secrets: a young fellow called Mascar, a wordless, grave individual, quiet, deferential of manner, but with a quick alertness that bespoke unusual efficiency.

He had been on guard in the workshop since the workmen left. When Jim and I arrived, Dr. Weatherby had sent Mascar home for his much needed sleep. But he was back again, now before dawn, ready to stand at the Elton switch and send us away.

Dr. Weatherby shook hands with him, as we all gathered by the huge bull’s-eye lens which was swung back to give ingress to the vehicle.

“You know what you are to do, Mascar. When we are well outside, throw off the Elton switch. Lock up the workshop and the house and go home. Report to the International Bureau of News that if they care to, they can announce that Dr. Weatherby’s vehicle has left the earth. You understand? Tell them they can assume, if they wish, that it will land safely on the moon.”

“I will do that,” said Mascar quietly. He shook hands with us all. And his fingers lightly touched Dolores’ head. “Good-bye, Miss Dolores.”

“Good-bye, Mascar. Good-bye. You’ve been very good to Grandfather. I thank you, Mascar. You wait at home. We will be back soon.”

“Yes,” he said. He turned away, and I could see he was striving to hide his emotion.

He swung on his heel, crossed the room, and stood quiet, with a firm hand upon the Elton switch.

Jim called impatiently, “Come on, everybody. Let’s get away.”

For one brief instant my gaze through the forward opened end of the building caught a brief vista of the peaceful Hudson countryside. Hills, and trees in the starlight, my own earth—my home.

The huge convex door of the vehicle swung ponderously closed upon us.

“Come to the instrument room,” said Dr. Weatherby.

We sat on the couch, huddled in a group. The bull’s-eye windows, made to withstand any pressure, were nevertheless ground in such a way that vision through them was crystal clear. The one beside me showed the interior of the workshop with Mascar standing at the Elton switch.

He had already thrown it. I could not hear the hum. But I saw the current’s effect upon Mascar. He was standing rigid, tense, and gripping the switch as though clinging. And then, with his other hand, he seized a discharging wire planted near at hand, so that the current left him comparatively unaffected.

Still I could feel nothing. My mind was whirling. What was it I expected to feel? I do not know. Dr. Weatherby had assured us we would undergo no terrifying experience; he seemed to have no fear for the girls. But how could he be sure?

The walls of the workshop now were luminous; Mascar’s motionless figure was a black blob of shadow in the glowing, snapping interior of the room. Sparks were crackling out there. But here in the vehicle there was nothing save a heavy silence; and the air was cold, dank, tomblike.

* * * * *

Then I felt the current; a tingling; a tiny, infinitely rapid tingling of the vehicle. It was not a vibration; the electric floor beneath my feet was solidly motionless. A tingling seemed to pervade its every atom.

Then I realized my body was tingling! A whir, a tiny throbbing. It brought a sense of nausea and a giddiness. Involuntarily I stood up, trembling, reeling. But Dr. Weatherby sharply drew me back.

Alice and Dolores were clinging to each other. Jim muttered something incoherent. I met his smile, but it was a very weak, surprised, apprehensive smile.

I tried to relax. The nausea was passing. My head steadied. But the tingling grew more intense within me. It was a humming now. Not audible. A humming I could feel, as though every minute cell of my body was throbbing.

It was not unpleasant after a moment. A peculiar sense of lightness was upon me. A sense of freedom. It grew to an exaltation. I was being set free! Unfettered at last. The chains that had bound me to earth were dropping away. But the mood upon me was more than an exaltation, an intoxication: a madness! I was conscious that Alice was laughing wildly.

I heard Dr. Weatherby’s sharp command, “Don’t do that! Look there; see the red ray?”

I clung to my reeling wits.

Jim muttered, “Look at it!”

The interior of the workshop was a whirling fog drenched in blood. I could see the red streaming out its open doorway.

“We’re moving!” Alice cried. “Dolores, we’ve started!”

The enveloping room of the workshop seemed gliding backward. Not a tremor of the vehicle. Mascar’s figure moved slowly backward and downward beyond my sight. The workshop walls were sliding past. The rectangle of its open end seemed expanding, coming toward us.

And then we were outside, in the starlit night. A dark hillside was dropping away. A silver ribbon of river was slipping beneath us, dropping downward, like a plummet falling.

The red ray had vanished. Dr. Weatherby’s voice, calm now, with a touch of triumph to it that all had gone so well, said,

“Mascar has extinguished the red ray. We used it only for starting. We must start slowly, Leonard.”

The river had vanished. A huge Polar liner—I recognized its group of colored lights as Ellison’s, flying in the forty thousand-foot lane—showed overhead. But it, too, seemed falling like a plummet. It flashed straight down past our window and disappeared.

Dr. Weatherby went to the instrument table. Time passed. It seemed only a moment or two though.

Dolores murmured, “Are we still moving, Jim? You must tell me. Tell me everything you see.”

The room was stiflingly hot. We were all gasping.

“I’ve turned on the refrigeration,” said Dr. Weatherby, “to counteract the heat of the friction of our passage through the atmosphere. It will be cool enough presently. Come over here. Don’t you want to look down?”

We gathered over the instrument room’s floor window. Stars were down there, white, red, and yellow stars in a field of dead black: a narrow crescent edge of stars, and all the rest was a gigantic dull red surface. Visibly convex! Patches of dark, formless areas of clouds. An ocean, the vaguely etched outlines of continents, the coastline of the Americas.

We were launched into space!

IV EXPANSION!

Then the vehicle cooled rapidly. Soon we had the heaters going. The coldness of space enveloped us penetrating the vehicle’s walls. But with the heaters we managed to be comfortable.

Dr. Weatherby sat at the instrument table. His chronometer there showed 5 A.M. We had started at 4 A.M. On one of the distant dials the miles were registering in units of a thousand. The dial-pointer was nearing XX6. Six thousand miles:

Dr. Weatherby glanced up as I appeared. Alice and Dolores, and Jim with them, had gone astern to prepare a broth. We were all of us still feeling a bit shaky, though the sense of lightness had worn off.

Dr. Weatherby had a chart on the table. It showed our solar system. The sun was at its center, and the planetary orbits in concentric circles around it. The planets and our own moon and a few of the larger comets and asteroids were all shown, their positions given progressively for each hour beginning at our starting time.

“I’m heading this way, Leonard. Holding the general plane in which the planets lie.” His finger traced a line from the earth, past the moon, past Mars. Jupiter and Saturn lay over to one side, and Neptune to the other. Uranus was far on the opposite side, beyond the sun.

Dr. Weatherby added, “The moon is drawing us now. But I shall shortly turn a neutral side toward it, and Mars will draw us. We are more than a freely falling body. We are being pulled downward.”

I sat beside him. “What is our velocity now?”

He gestured toward a dial, an ingenious affair. He had already explained its workings, the lessening rate of the earth’s gravitational pull shown by a hair-spring balance as a figure on the dial.

“Three thousand miles an hour, Leonard.” But as I watched, the figure moved to 4; and then to 5, 6 and 7.

The moon, nearly full, lay below us, ahead of us, white, glittering and cold, with the black firmament and the stars clustering about it. We were falling bow down. Overhead, above our blunt stern, the giant crescent earth hung across the firmament. It was still dull red; its configurations of land and water were plainly visible. A silver sunlight edged it.

“Ah, the sun, Leonard!” Abruptly we had emerged from the earth’s conical shadow into the sunlight. But the heavens remained black. The stars blazed with a cold, white gleam as before. And behind us was the white sun with its corona of flame leaping from it.

* * * * *

I have said we were falling—our projectile falling bow down, like a plummet. Gazing through the window it seemed so. But the effect was psychological. I could as readily picture us on a level, proceeding onward.

It was as though we were poised within a giant hollow globe of black glass, star encrusted. There could be no standards of up, or down; it was all as the mind chanced to conceive it. But within the vehicle itself, its soundless, vibrationless, level floor beneath our feet, a complete sense of normality remained.

“Dr. Weatherby,” I said, “that model . . . you remember, it grew gigantic. But we . . . we’re still the same size at which we started?”

For an hour past, a thousand questions had been seething in my mind. This navigation of space was clear enough. All my life scientists had been discussing it. We were moving now at a velocity of some twelve thousand miles an hour. But what was that? Less than the crawling of an ant using the equator of the earth as a race track! Twelve thousand miles an hour—or twelve billion—would get us nowhere among the distant stars in a lifetime!

Dr. Weatherby answered my spoken question: “We are only very little larger than when we started, Leonard. An infinitesimal fraction, for our velocity is nothing as yet. I’ll use the Elton Beta ray once we get farther out.”

He turned to his switches. Through the window I saw the firmament swing slightly. He was navigating, heading for some distant realm beyond all the stars that we could see, all the stars that could exist out there. This tiny vehicle, threading its way. How did he, how could he possibly know his way?

I asked him bluntly, and he looked up from his chart with a smile. “Leonard, in five minutes I could tell you every remaining fundamental of the laws which are governing us. I will tell you, but I want Jim to hear it too. And I’m absorbed now in getting out past the asteroids. A little later, I’ll make it clear.”

We dropped past the moon at a distance of perhaps a hundred thousand miles. We were then some two hundred and forty thousand miles from earth. It was nearly noon, with the earth standard time of Dr. Weatherby’s home. We had been traveling eight hours; constantly accelerating, our velocity at noon had reached a thousand miles a minute.

The moon, as we passed it, floated upward with a quite visible movement. It was a magnificent sight, though the smallest of telescopes on earth brought it visually nearer than it was now.

We ate our first meal, slept, settled down to the routine of life on the vehicle. Another twelve hours passed. Our velocity had reached then a thousand miles a second. But that was only the one hundred and eighty-sixth part of the velocity of light!

We were now—with an average rate of five hundred miles a second from the time we left—some twenty-one million and six hundred thousand miles from earth. Half way to Mars! But in four hours more the red planet floated upward past us. Dr. Weatherby kept well away—a million miles his instrument showed as he measured the planet’s visible diameter.

We had now reached a velocity of some twenty thousand miles a second.

“I shall hold it at that,” Dr. Weatherby said. “It’s too crowded in here, too dangerous.”

We traversed the asteroid region at about that rate. It was a tedious, tense voyage, so dangerous that for nearly five hours one of us was always at the tower window, to avoid a possible collision. The belt in here between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter was thick-strewn with asteroids. But none came near enough to endanger us.

We crossed Jupiter’s orbit. Again Dr. Weatherby accelerated to one hundred thousand miles a second, but it was over an hour before we crossed Saturn’s orbit, four hundred million miles further on. We went no faster for a time.

At this velocity it was tedious. Uranus’s orbit at seventeen hundred million miles from our sun; Neptune at twenty-seven hundred million. And then that last outpost of the solar system, Xavion, discovered in 1964. The planet was at the opposite point of its orbit. We could not see it. Our own sun had long since dwindled into invisibility.

At last we were away! Launched into the realms of outer stellar space, plunging onward at a hundred thousand miles a second. But ahead of us the giant stars showed no change. As imperturbably distant in their aspect as when we started.

We, Jim and I, had had many hours of futile discussion: some in our own room, but more in the little tower where we sat on watch, gazing ahead at the motionless stars, our eyes at the small search-telescopes with which we swept the space into which the projectile was dropping.

We had seen many asteroids, but none near enough to be dangerous. And we passed the hours wondering what it was Dr. Weatherby had to tell us. How did he know where he was going? What was his direction? In all this chaos of immeasurable, unfathomable distance, of what avail to attempt any set direction? By what points could he navigate? It was unthinkable.

And more unthinkable: we had attained a maximum velocity of over one hundred thousand miles a second, only a little more than half the velocity of light. The _nearest_ star we knew to be over four light-years away. Light, traveling one hundred and eighty-six thousand, four hundred miles a second, took 4.35 years to reach that star. At this rate, we would take some eight years!

And this was the _nearest star_! Others were a thousand . . . tens of thousands . . . a hundred thousand times farther! Eighty thousand years, even eight hundred thousand years, we would have to travel to reach the distant nebulae! And even then, what realms of dark and empty space might lie beyond! It was unthinkable.

“He’ll explain when he gets ready,” said Jim.

* * * * *

And he did. He called us into the instrument room, shortly after we crossed the orbit of Xavion. He spoke with a slow, precise phrasing: the careful phrasing of a scientist intent upon conveying his exact meaning.

“I think I told you once, Leonard, as a matter of actuality I stumbled upon this thing—these laws which are to govern our flight from now onward. They are definite laws, inherent in all matter.

“We are about to undergo an experience stranger, I think, than any man has undergone before. But not because of any intricate devices with which I have equipped this vehicle. Not at all. Merely the progressive workings of natural laws.

“I have experimented with them for some years. I think I understand them, though I am not sure. But their character, the actual, tangible result of what shortly will happen to us, that, I understand perfectly.”

“What are the laws?” Jim demanded.

He gestured. “In a moment, Jim. I will say first that all this is merely a question of velocity. Matter, as it exists everywhere, is, as you well know, in varying states of velocity.

“And as the velocity changes, so does every other attribute of the substance. A group of electrons inherent in a lightning bolt, the intimes of a flying beam of light, are very different in temporary character from those of a bar of iron. But only different by virtue of their temporary velocity.

“Do I make myself plain? Any substance, for a very brief period, tends to maintain its integrity, its independent existence. But countless forces and conditions are assailing it. Wood burns, or rots. Iron rusts. The human body—a conglomeration of cells loosely clinging into a semblance of an independent entity—grows old, dies, disintegrates.

“Nothing is in a permanent state, a permanent condition of substance. The change may be slowly progressive. Or it may be sudden and violent.

“I’ll be more specific. The Elton ray, acting upon the sensitive intimes of electrite, brings a sudden—and to that extent, unnatural—change.

“An added velocity was imparted to this vehicle and we left the earth. The Elton current is operating the vehicle now. We have reached, or very nearly reached, the limit of velocity we can attain by using the force of celestial gravity—one hundred thousand miles a second.

“As I told you, however, we can now use the Elton Beta ray. Our vehicle, carrying the source of the ray forward, will presently attain a velocity—” He stopped, smiled gently, and added, “To our finite minds, it will be infinite. There will presently be no standards by which we can conceive it.”

I would have interrupted him with a question, but he raised his hand. “In a moment, Leonard; then I want you and Jim to ask me any questions you like. All this that I have said, is prefatory. The question is one solely of velocity. The rest is automatic. The natural laws governing the attributes of matter in relation to its velocity are these:

“First: A substance whose velocity is increased loses density proportionately. For instance, our vehicle, I consider it as a whole, you understand. As its velocity increases, it becomes less dense in substance. Comparatively less dense. Everything is comparative, of course. We ourselves have undergone the same change.”

“A loss of density!” I exclaimed. “Then, of course, expanding, becoming more diffuse.”

“Exactly, Leonard. And that is the second law. Our _size_ is growing directly in proportion to our growing velocity.”

I grasped it now. An infinite velocity had suddenly been imparted to the model of the vehicle. It had expanded, like a puff of vapor, over all the sky! Dr. Weatherby went on in his same careful voice.

“These two changes—a loss of density and a gain in size—have been going on ever since we left the earth. They amount to little as yet. But presently I am going to increase our velocity immeasurably. External objects—the stars out there, you will see the change when you look at them.

“Do you understand me? The principle is obvious. A cold, dark star is small and dense. And moves slowly. A giant star is hot, of little density, and it has an enormous velocity.” He paused.

Jim interjected, “I think we understand you, Dr. Weatherby. With this infinite velocity, we will pass beyond the stars. And growing in size . . . to be gigantic.”

“So that, proportionately, the stars will shrink to atoms,” said Alice.

Jim nodded. “Yes. I understand that. It sort of makes you gasp.”

“But,” I exclaimed, “Dr. Weatherby, you have held communication with other living minds, other beings, somewhere out here. Dolores’s thought-waves.”

“Yes,” he said. “Thought-waves are infinitely faster than light. No one has ever—”

“I mean,” I went on, “we are hoping to reach those other beings. But how—this is what Jim and I can’t understand—how do you know where you are going? Might we not be heading directly away? Or perhaps Dolores is receiving the thought-waves progressively stronger and thus guiding us.”

“No,” Dolores spoke up. “It is difficult to receive the thoughts. There has been no time since we left—” She stopped, and added, “That makes me realize, didn’t Alice leave us a moment ago?”

“Yes,” said Jim. “It’s time for lunch.”

Dolores left her grandfather’s side. “I must go help her.”

Alice had slipped quietly away. Dolores now joined her in the galley.