Part 6 (1/2)
The elder Dr. Arcot glanced in surprise at the heavy-duty ammeter in a control panel.
”Half a billion amperes! Good Lord! Where is all that power going?” He looked at his son.
”Into the storage coils. It's going in at ten kilovolts, so that's a five billion kilowatt supply. It's been going for half an hour and has half an hour to run. It takes two tons of matter to charge the coil to capacity, and we're carrying twenty tons of fuel--enough for ten charges. We shouldn't need more than three tons if all goes well, but 'all' seldom does.
”See that large black cylinder up there?” Arcot asked, pointing.
Above them, lying along the roof of the power room, lay a great black cylinder nearly two feet in diameter and extending out through the wall in the rear. It was made integral with two giant lux metal beams that reached to the bow of the s.h.i.+p in a long, sweeping curve. From one of the power switchboards, two heavy cables ran up to the giant cylinder.
”That's the main horizontal power unit. We can develop an acceleration of ten gravities either forward or backward. In the curve of the s.h.i.+p, on top, sides, and bottom, there are power units for motion in the other two directions.
”Most of the rest of the stuff in this section is old hat to you, though. Come on into the next room.”
Arcot opened the heavy relux door, leading the way into the next room, which was twice the size of the power room. The center of the floor was occupied by a heavy pedestal of lux metal upon which was a huge, relux-encased, double torus storage coil. There was a large switchboard at the opposite end, while around the room, in ordered groups, stood the familiar double coils, each five feet in diameter. The s.p.a.ce within them was already darkening.
”Well,” said Arcot, senior, ”that's some battery of power coils, considering the amount of energy one can store. But what's the big one for?”
”That's the main s.p.a.ce control,” the younger Arcot answered. ”While our power is stored in the smaller ones, we can shoot it into this one, which, you will notice, is constructed slightly differently. Instead of holding the field within it, completely enclosed, the big one will affect all the s.p.a.ce about it. We will then be enclosed in what might be called a hypers.p.a.ce of our own making.”
”I see,” said his father. ”You go into hypers.p.a.ce and move at any speed you please. But how will you see where you're going?”
”We won't, as far as I know. I don't expect to see a thing while we're in that hypers.p.a.ce. We'll simply aim the s.h.i.+p in the direction we want to go and then go into hypers.p.a.ce. The only thing we have to avoid is stars; their gravitational fields would drain the energy out of the apparatus and we'd end up in the center of a white-hot star. Meteors and such, we don't have to worry about; their fields aren't strong enough to drain the coils, and since we won't be in normal s.p.a.ce, we can't hit them.”
The elder Morey looked worried. ”If you can't see your way back you'll get lost! And you can't radio back for help.”
”Worse than that!” said Arcot. ”We couldn't receive a signal of any kind after we get more than three hundred light years away; there weren't any radios before that.
”What we'll do is locate ourselves through the sun's light. We'll take photographs every so often and orient ourselves by them when we come back.”
”That sounds like an excellent method of stellar navigation,” agreed Morey senior. ”Let's see the rest of the s.h.i.+p.” He turned and walked toward the farther door.
The next room was the laboratory. On one side of the room was a complete physics lab and on the other was a well-stocked and well-equipped chemistry lab. They could perform many experiments here that no man had been able to perform due to lack of power. In this s.h.i.+p they had more generating facilities than all the power stations of Earth combined!
Arcot opened the next door. ”This next room is the physics and chemistry storeroom. Here we have a duplicate--in some cases, six or seven duplicates--of every piece of apparatus on board, and plenty of material to make more. Actually, we have enough equipment to make a new s.h.i.+p out of what we have here. It would be a good deal smaller, but it would work.
”The greater part of our materials is stored in the curvature of the s.h.i.+p, where it will be easy to get at if necessary. All our water and food is there, and the emergency oxygen tanks.
”Now let's take the stairway to the upper deck.”
The upper deck was the main living quarters. There were several small rooms on each side of the corridor down the center; at the extreme nose was the control room, and at the extreme stern was the observatory. The observatory was equipped with a small but exceedingly powerful telectroscope, developed from those the Nigrans had left on one of the deserted planets Sol had captured in return for the loss of Pluto to the Black Star. The arc commanded by the instrument was not great, but it was easy to turn the s.h.i.+p about, and most of their observations could be made without trouble.
Each of the men had a room of his own; there was a small galley and a library equipped with all the books the four men could think of as being useful. The books and all other equipment were clamped in place to keep them from flying around loose when the s.h.i.+p accelerated.
The control room at the nose was surrounded by a hemisphere of transparent lux metal which enabled them to see in every direction except directly behind, and even that blind spot could be covered by stationing a man in the observatory.
There were heat projectors and molecular ray projectors, each operated from the control room in the nose. To complete the armament, there were more projectors in the stern, controlled from the observatory, and a set on either side controlled from the library and the galley.
The s.h.i.+p was provisioned for two years--two years without stops. With the possibility of stopping on other planets, the four men could exist indefinitely in the s.h.i.+p.