Operation: Outer Space by Murray Leinster (best short novels of all time TXT) 📖

man in the strap-chair pressed hard on the controls. Cochrane glanced desperately out of one of the side ports. He saw the moonscape—the frozen lava sea with its layer of whitish-tan moondust. He saw many moon-jeeps gathered near, as if most of the population of Lunar City had been gathered to watch this event. He saw the extraordinary nearness of the moon's horizon.

But it was the most momentary of glimpses. As he opened his mouth to roar a protest, he felt the upward, curiously comforting thrust of acceleration to one full Earth-gravity.

The moonscape was snatched away from beneath the ship. It did not descend. The ship did not seem to rise. The moon itself diminished and vanished like a pricked bubble. The speed of its disappearance was not—it specifically was not—attributable to one earth-gravity of lift applied on a one-sixth-gravity moon.

The loudspeaker hiccoughed and was silent. Cochrane uttered the roar he had started before the added acceleration began. But it was useless. Out the side-port, he saw the stars. They were not still and changeless and winking, as they appeared from the moon. These stars seemed to stir uneasily, to shift ever so slightly among themselves, like flecks of bright color drifting on a breeze.

Jones said in an interested voice:

"Now we'll try the booster."

He threw another switch. And again there was a momentary throbbing sound which was not quite a sound. It was actually a sensation, which one seemed to feel all through one's body. It lasted only the fraction of a second, but while it lasted the stars out the side-ports ceased to be stars. They became little lines of light, all moving toward the ship's stern but at varying rates of speed. Some of them[Pg 71] passed beyond view. Some of them moved only a little. But all shifted.

Then they were again tiny spots of light, of innumerable tints and colors, of every conceivably degree of brightness, stirring and moving ever-so-slightly with relation to each other.

"The devil!" said Cochrane, raging.

Jones turned to him. And Jones was not quite poker-faced, now. Not quite. He looked even pleased. Then his face went back to impassiveness again.

"It worked," he said mildly.

"I know it worked!" sputtered Cochrane. "But—where are we? How far did we come?"

"I haven't the least idea," said Jones mildly as before. "Does it matter?"

Cochrane glared at him. Then he realized how completely too late it was to protest anything.

The man he had seen absorbed in the handling of controls now lifted his hands from the board. The rockets died. There was a vast silence, and weightlessness. Cochrane weighed nothing. This was free flight again—like practically all of the ninety-odd hours from the space platform to the moon. The pilot left the controls and in an accustomed fashion soared to a port on the opposite side of the room. He gazed out, and then behind, and said in a tone of astonished satisfaction:

"This is good!—There's the sun!"

"How far?" asked Jones.

"It's fifth magnitude," said the pilot happily. "We really did pile on the horses!"

Jones looked momentarily pleased again. Cochrane said in a voice that even to himself sounded outraged:

"You mean the sun's a fifth-magnitude star from here? What the devil happened?"

"Booster," said Jones, nearly with enthusiasm. "When the field was just a radiation speed-up, I used forty milliamperes of current to the square centimetre of field-plate. That was the field-strength when we sent the signal-rocket across the crater. For the distress-torpedo test, I stepped the field-strength up. I used a tenth of an ampere per square centimetre. I told you! And don't you remember that I wondered what would happen if I used a capacity-storage system?"

Cochrane held fast to a hand-hold.[Pg 72]

"The more power you put into your infernal field," he demanded, "the more speed you get?"

Jones said contentedly:

"There's a limit. It depends on the temperature of the things in the field. But I've fixed up the field, now, like a spot-welding outfit. Like a strobe-light. We took off with a light field. It's on now—we have to keep it on. But I got hold of some pretty storage condensers. I hooked them up in parallel to get a momentary surge of high-amperage current when I shorted them through my field-making coils. Couldn't make it a steady current! Everything would blow! But I had a surge of probably six amps per square centimetre for a while."

Cochrane swallowed.

"The field was sixty times as strong as the one the distress-torpedo used? We went—we're going—sixty times as fast?"

"We had lots more speed than that!" But then Jones' enthusiasm dwindled. "I haven't had time to check," he said unhappily. "It's one of the things I want to get at right away. But in theory the field should modify the effect of inertia as the fourth power of its strength. Sixty to the fourth is—."

"How far," demanded Cochrane, "is Proxima Centaurus? That's the nearest star to Earth. How near did we come to reaching it?"

The pilot on the other side of the control-room said with a trace less than his former zest:

"That looks like Sirius, over there ..."

"We didn't head for Proxima Centaurus," said Jones mildly. "It's too close! And we have to keep the field-plate back on the moon lined up with us, more or less, so we headed out roughly along the moon's axis. Toward where its north pole points."

"Then where are we headed? Where are we going?"

"We're not going anywhere just yet," said Jones without interest. "We have to find out where we are, and from that—"

Cochrane ran his hand through his hair.

"Look!" he protested. "Who's running this show? You didn't tell me you were going to take off! You didn't pick out a destination! You didn't—"

Jones said very patiently:

"We have to try out the ship. We have to find out how fast it goes with how much field and how much rocket-thrust.[Pg 73] We have to find out how far we went and if it was in a straight line. We even have to find out how to land! The ship's a new piece of apparatus. We can't do things with it until we find out what it can do."

Cochrane stared at him. Then he swallowed.

"I see," he said. "The financial and business department of Spaceways, Inc., has done its stuff for the time being."

Jones nodded.

"The technical staff now takes over?"

Jones nodded again.

"I still think," said Cochrane, "that we could have done with a little interdepartmental cooperation. How long before you know what you're about?"

Jones shook his head.

"I can't even guess. Ask Babs to come up here, will you?"

Cochrane threw up his hands. He went toward the spiral-ladder-with-handholds that led below. He went down into the main saloon. A tiny green light winked on and off, urgently, on the far side. Babs was seated at a tiny board, there. As Cochrane looked, she pushed buttons with professional skill. Bill Holden sat in a strap-chair with his face a greenish hue.

"We took off," said Holden in a strained voice.

"We did," said Cochrane. "And the sun's a fifth magnitude star from where we've got to—which is no place in particular. And I've just found out that we started off at random and Jones and the pilot he picked up are now happily about to do some pure-science research!"

Holden closed his eyes.

"When you want to cheer me up," he said feebly, "you can tell me we're about to crash somewhere and this misery will soon be over."

Cochrane said bitterly:

"Taking off without a destination! Letting Babs come along! They don't know how far we've come and they don't know where we're going! This is a hell of a way to run a business!"

"Who called it a business?" asked Holden, as feebly as before. "It started out as a psychiatric treatment!"

Babs' voice came from the side of the saloon where she sat at a vision-tube and microphone. She was saying professionally:

"I assure you it's true. We are linked to you by the[Pg 74] Dabney field, in which radiation travels much faster than light. When you were a little boy didn't you ever put a string between two tin cans, and then talk along the string?"

Cochrane stopped beside her scowling. She looked up.

"The press association men on Luna, Mr. Cochrane. They saw us take off, and the radar verified that we traveled some hundred of thousands of miles, but then we simply vanished! They don't understand how they can talk to us without even the time-lag between Earth and Lunar City. I was explaining."

"I'll take it," said Cochrane. "Jones wants you in the control-room. Cameras? Who was handling the cameras?"

"Mr. Bell," said Babs briskly. "It's his hobby, along with poker-playing and children."

"Tell him to get some pictures of the star-fields around us," said Cochrane, "and then you can see what Jones wants. I will do a little business!"

He settled down in the seat Babs had vacated. He faced the two press-association reporters in the screen. They had seen the ship's take off. It was verified beyond any reasonable question. The microwave beam to Earth was working at capacity to transmit statements from the Moon Observatory, which annoyedly conceded that the Spaceways, Inc., salvaged ship had taken off with an acceleration beyond belief. But, the astronomers said firmly, the ship and all its contents must necessarily have been destroyed by the shock of their departure. The acceleration must have been as great as the shock of a meteor hitting Luna.

"You can consider," Cochrane told them, "that I am now an angel, if you like. But how about getting a statement from Dabney?"

A press-association man, back on Luna, uttered the first profanity ever to travel faster than light.

"All he can talk about," he said savagely, "is how wonderful he is! He agrees with the Observatory that you must all be dead. He said so. Can you give us any evidence that you're alive and out in space? Visual evidence, for broadcast?"

At this moment the entire fabric of the space-ship moved slightly. There was no sound of rockets. The ship seemed to turn a little, but that was all. No gravity. No acceleration. It was a singularly uncomfortable sensation, on top of the discomfort of weightlessness.

Cochrane said sardonically:[Pg 75]

"If you can't take my word that I'm alive, I'll try to get you some proof! Hm. I'll send you some pictures of the star-fields around us. Shoot them to observatories back on Earth and let them figure out for themselves where we are! Displacement of the relative positions of the stars ought to let them figure things out!"

He left the communicator-board. Holden still looked greenish in his strap-chair. The main saloon was otherwise empty. Cochrane made his way gingerly to the stair going below. He stepped into thin air and descended by a pull on the hand-rail.

This was the dining-saloon. The ship having been built to impress investors in a stock-sales enterprise, it had been beautifully equipped with trimmings. And, having had to rise from Earth to Luna, and needing to take an acceleration of a good many gravities, it had necessarily to be reasonably well-built. It had had, in fact, to be an honest job of ship-building in order to put across a phoney promotion. But there were trimmings that could have been spared. The ports opening upon emptiness, for example, were not really practical arrangements. But everybody but Holden and the two men in the control-room now clustered at those ports, looking out at the stars. There was Jamison and Bell the writer, and Johnny Simms and his wife. Babs had been here and gone.

Bell was busy with a camera. As Cochrane moved to tell him of the need for star-shots to prove to a waiting planet that they were alive, Johnny Simms turned and saw Cochrane. His expression was amiable and unawed.

"Hello," said Johnny Simms cheerfully.

Cochrane nodded curtly.

"I bought West's stock in Spaceways," said Johnny Simms, amusedly, "because I want to come along. Right?"

"So I heard," said Cochrane, as curtly as before.

"West said," Johnny Simms told him gleefully, "that he was going back to Earth, punch Kursten, Kasten, Hopkins and Fallowe on their separate noses, and then go down to South Carolina and raise edible snails for the rest of his life."

"An understandable ambition," said Cochrane. He frowned, waiting to talk to Bell, who was taking an infernally long time to focus a camera out of a side-port.

"It's going to be good when he tries to cash my check," said Johnny Simms delightedly. "I stopped payment on it[Pg 76] when he wouldn't pick up the tab for some drinks I invited him to have!"

Cochrane forced his face to impassiveness. Johnny Simms was that way, he understood. He was a psychopathic personality. He was completely insensitive to notions of ethics. Ideas of right and wrong were as completely meaningless to him as tones to a tone-deaf person, or pastel tints to a man who is color-blind. They simply didn't register. His mind was up to par, and he could be a charming companion. He could experience the most kindly of emotions and most generous of impulses, which he put