Chapter 14: Intergalactic Space

“Well, Sirius has retreated a bit,” observed Arcot. The star was indeed several trillions of miles away. Evidently they had not been motionless as they had thought, but the interference of the Thessian ship had thrown their machine off.

“Shall we go back, or go on?” asked Morey.

“The ship works. Why return?” asked Wade. “I vote we go on.”

“Seconded,” added Arcot.

“If they who know most of the ship vote for a continuance of the journey, then assuredly we who know so little can only abide by their judgment. Let us continue,” said Zezdon Afthen gravely.

Space was suddenly black about them. Sirius was gone, all the jewels of the heavens were gone in the black of swift flight. Ten seconds later Arcot lowered the space-control. Black behind them the night of space was pricked by points of light, the infinite multitude of the stars. Before them lay--nothing. The utter emptiness of space between the galaxies.

“Thlek Styrs! What happened?” asked Morey in amazement, his pet Venerian phrase rolling out in his astonishment.

“Tried an experiment, and it was overly successful,” replied Arcot, a worried look on his face. “I tried combining the Thessian high speed time distortion with our high speed space distortion--both on low power. ‘There ain’t no sich animals, ‘ as the old agriculturist remarked of the giraffe. God knows what speed we hit, but it was plenty. We must be ten thousand light years beyond the galaxy.”

“That’s a fine way to start the trip. You have the old star maps to get back however, have you not?” asked Wade.

“Yes, the maps we made on our first trip out this way are in the cabinet. Look ‘em up, will you, and see how far we have to go before we reach the cosmic fields?”

Arcot was busy with his instruments, making a more accurate determination of their distance from the “edge” of the galaxy. He adopted the figure of twelve thousand five hundred light years as the probable best result. Wade was back in a moment with the information that the fields lay about sixteen thousand light years out. Arcot went on, at a rate that would reach the fields in two hours.

Several hours more were spent in measurements, till at last Arcot announced himself satisfied.

“Good enough--back we go.” Again in the control room, he threw on the drive, and shot through the twenty-seven thousand light years of cosmic ray fields, and then more leisurely returned to the galaxy. The star maps were strangely off. They could follow them, but only with difficulty as the general configuration of the constellations that were their guides were visibly altered to the naked eye.

“Morey,” said Arcot softly, looking at the constellation at which they were then aiming, and at the map before him, “there is something very, very rotten. The Universe either ‘ain’t what it used to be’ or we have traveled in more than space.”

“I know it, and I agree with you. Obviously, from the degree of alteration off the constellations, we are off by about 100,000 years. Question: how come? Question: what are we going to do about it?”

“Answer one: remembering what we observed in re Sirius, I suspect that the interference of that Thessian ship, with its time-field opposing our space-field did things to our time-frame. We were probably thrown off then.

“As to the second question, we have to determine number one first. Then we can plan our actions.”

With Wade’s help, and by coming to rest near several of the stars, then observing their actual motions, they were able to determine their time-status. The estimate they made finally was of the order of eighty thousand years in the past! The Thessian ship had thrown them that much out of their time.

“This isn’t all to the bad,” said Morey with a sigh. “We at least have all the time we could possibly use to determine the things we want for this fight. We might even do a lot of exploring for the archeologists of Earth and Venus and Ortol and Talso. As to getting back--that’s a question.”

“Which is,” added Arcot, “easy to answer now, thank the good Lord. All we have to do is wait for our time to catch up with us. If we just wait eighty thousand years, eight hundred centuries, we will be in our own time.”

“Oh, I think waiting so long would be boring,” said Wade sarcastically. “What do you suggest we do in the intervening eighty millenniums? Play cards?”

“Oh, cards or chess. Something like that,” grinned Arcot. “Play cards, calculate our fields--and turn on the time rate control.”

“Oh--I take it back. You win! Take all! I forgot all about that,” Wade smiled at his friend. “That will save a little waiting, won’t it.”

“The exploring of our worlds would without doubt be of infinite benefit to science, but I wonder if it would not be of more direct benefit if we were to get back to our own time, alive and well. Accidents always happen, and for all our weapons, we might easily meet some animal which would put an abrupt and tragic finish to our explorations. Is it not so?” asked Stel Felso Theu.

“Your point is good, Stel Felso Theu. I agree with you. We will do no more exploring than is necessary, or safe.”

“We might just as well travel slowly on the time retarder, and work on the way. I think the thing to do is to go back to Earth, or better, the solar system, and follow the sun in its path.”

They returned, and the desolation that the sun in its journey passes through is nothing to the utter, oppressive desolation of empty space between the stars, for it has its family of planets--and it has no conscious thought.

The Sun was far from the point that it had occupied when the travelers had left it, billions on billions of miles further on its journey around the gravitational center of our galactic universe, and in the eighty millenniums that they must wait, it would go far.

They did not go to the planets now, for, as Arcot said in reply to Stel Felso Theu’s suggestion that they determine more accurately their position in time, life had not developed to an extent that would enable them to determine the year according to our calendar.

So for thirty thousand years they hung motionless as the sun moved on, and the little spots of light, that were worlds, hurled about it in a mad race. Even Pluto, in its three-hundred-year-long track seemed madly gyrating beneath them; Mercury was a line of light, as it swirled about the swiftly moving sun.

But that thirty thousand years was thirty days to the men of the ship. Their time rate immensely retarded, they worked on their calculations. At the end of that month Arcot had, with the help of Morey and Wade, worked out the last of the formulas of artificial matter, and the machines had turned out the last graphical function of the last branch of research that they could discover. It was a time of labor for them, and they worked almost constantly, stopping occasionally for a game of some sort to relax the nervous tension.

At the end of that month they decided that they would go to Earth.

They speeded their time rate now, and flashed toward Earth at enormous speed that brought them within the atmosphere in minutes. They had landed in the valley of the Nile. Arcot had suggested this as a means of determining the advancement of life of man. Man had evidently established some of his earliest civilizations in this valley where water and sun for his food plants were assured.

“Look--there are men here!” exclaimed Wade. Indeed, below them were villages, of crude huts made of timber and stone and mud. Rubble work walls, for they needed little shelter here, and the people were but savages.

“Shall we land?” asked Arcot, his voice a bit unsteady with suppressed excitement.

“Of course!” replied Morey without turning from his station at the window. Below them now, less than half a mile down on the patchwork of the Nile valley, men were standing, staring up, collecting in little groups, gesticulating toward the strange thing that had materialized in the air above them.