Chapter 2

But Does Not Arrive

“All out--we climb the rest of the way on foot,” Stevens told his companion, as the elevator stopped at the uppermost passenger floor. They walked across the small circular hall and the guard on duty came to attention and saluted as they approached him.

“I have orders to pass you and Miss Newton, sir. Do you know all the combinations?”

“I know this good old tub better than the men that built her--I helped calculate her,” Stevens replied, as he stepped up to an apparently blank wall of steel and deftly manipulated an almost invisible dial set flush with its surface. “This is to keep the passengers where they belong,” he explained, as a section of the wall swung backward in a short arc and slid smoothly aside. “We will now proceed to see what makes it tick.”

Ladder after ladder of steel they climbed, and bulkhead after bulkhead opened at Stevens’s knowing touch. At each floor the mathematician explained to the girl the operation of the machinery there automatically at work--devices for heating and cooling, devices for circulating, maintaining, and purifying the air and the water--in short, all the complex mechanism necessary for the comfort and convenience of the human cargo of the liner.

Soon they entered the conical top compartment, a room scarcely fifteen feet in diameter, tapering sharply upward to a hollow point some twenty feet above them. The true shape of the room, however, was not immediately apparent, because of the enormous latticed beams and girders which braced the walls in every direction. The air glowed with the violet light of the twelve great ultra-light projectors, like searchlights with three-foot lenses, which lined the wall. The floor beneath their feet was not a level steel platform, but seemed to be composed of many lenticular sections of dull blue alloy.

“We are standing upon the upper lookout lenses, aren’t we?” asked the girl. “Is that perfectly all right?”

“Sure. They’re so hard that nothing can scratch them, and of course Roeser’s Rays go right through our bodies, or any ordinary substance, like a bullet through a hole in a Swiss cheese. Even those lenses wouldn’t deflect them if they weren’t solid fields of force.”

As he spoke, one of the ultra-lights flashed around in a short, quick arc, and the girl saw that instead of the fierce glare she had expected, it emitted only a soft violet light. Nevertheless she dodged involuntarily and Stevens touched her arm reassuringly.

“All x, Miss Newton--they’re as harmless as mice. They hardly ever have to swing past the vertical, and even if one shines right through you you can look it right in the eye as long as you want to--it can’t hurt you a bit.”

“No ultra-violet at all?”

“None whatever. Just a color--one of the many remaining crudities of our ultra-light vision. A lot of good men are studying this thing of direct vision, though, and it won’t be long before we have a system that will really work.”

“I think it’s all perfectly wonderful!” she breathed. “Just think of traveling in comfort through empty space, and of actually seeing through seamless steel walls, without even a sign of a window! How can such things be possible?”

“I’ll have to go pretty well back,” he warned, “and any adequate explanation is bound to be fairly deep wading in spots. How technical can you stand it?”

“I can go down with you middling deep--I took a lot of general science, and physics through advanced mechanics. Of course, I didn’t get into any such highly specialized stuff as sub-electronics or Roeser’s Rays, but if you start drowning me, I’ll yell.”

“That’s fine--you can get the idea all x, with that to go on. Let’s sit down here on this girder. Roeser didn’t do it all, by any means, even though he got credit for it--he merely helped the Martians do it. The whole thing started, of course, when Goddard shot his first rocket to the moon, and was intensified when Roeser so perfected his short waves that signals were exchanged with Mars--signals that neither side could make any sense out of. Goddard’s pupils and followers made bigger and better rockets, and finally got one that could land safely upon Mars. Roeser, who was a mighty keen bird, was one of the first voyagers, and he didn’t come back--he stayed there, living in a space-suit for three or four years, and got a brand-new education. Martian science always was hot, you know, but they were impractical. They were desperately hard up for water and air, and while they had a lot of wonderful ideas and theories, they couldn’t overcome the practical technical difficulties in the way of making their ideas work. Now putting other peoples’ ideas to work was Roeser’s long suit--don’t think that I’m belittling Roeser at all, either, for he was a brave and far-sighted man, was no mean scientist, and was certainly one of the best organizers and synchronizers the world has ever known--and since Martian and Tellurian science complemented each other, so that one filled in the gaps of the other, it wasn’t long until fleets of space-freighters were bringing in air and water from Venus, which had more of both than she needed or wanted.

“Having done all he could for the Martians and having learned most of the stuff he wanted to know, Roeser came back to Tellus and organized Interplanetary, with scientists and engineers on all three planets, and set to work to improve the whole system, for the vessels they used then were dangerous--regular mankillers, in fact. At about this same time Roeser and the Interplanetary Corporation had a big part in the unification of the world into one nation, so that wars could no longer interfere with progress.”

“With this introduction I can get down to fundamentals. Molecules are particles of the first order, and vibrations of the first order include sound, light, heat, electricity, radio, and so on. Second order, atoms--extremely short vibrations, such as hard X-rays. Third order, electrons and protons, with their accompanying Millikan, or cosmic, rays. Fourth order, sub-electrons and sub-protons. These, in the material aspect, are supposed to be the particles of the fourth order, and in the energy aspect they are known as Roeser’s Rays. That is, these fourth-order rays and particles seem to partake of the nature of both energy and matter. Following me?”

“Right behind you,” she assured him. She had been listening intently, her wide-spaced brown eyes fastened upon his face.

“Since these Roeser’s Rays, or particles or rays of the fourth order, seem to be both matter and energy, and since the rays can be converted into what is supposed to be the particles, they have been thought to be the things from which both electrons and protons were built. Therefore, everybody except Norman Brandon has supposed them the ultimate units of creation, so that it would be useless to try to go any further...”

“Why, we were taught that they are the ultimate units!” she protested.

“I know you were--but we really don’t know anything, except what we have learned empirically, even about our driving forces. What is called the fourth-order particle is absolutely unknown, since nobody has been able to detect it, to say nothing of determining its velocity or other properties. It has been assumed to have the velocity of light only because that hypothesis does not conflict with observational data. I’m going to give you the generally accepted idea, since we have nothing definite to offer in its place, but I warn you that that idea is very probably wrong. There’s a lot of deep stuff down there hasn’t been dug up yet. In fact, Brandon thinks that the product of conversion isn’t what we think it is, at all--that the actual fundamental unit and the primary mechanism of the transformation lie somewhere below the fourth order, and possibly even below the level of the ether--but we haven’t been able to find a point of attack yet that will let us get in anywhere. However, I’m getting ‘way ahead of our subject. To get back to it, energy can be converted into something that acts like matter through Roeser’s Rays, and that is the empirical fact underlying the drive of our space-ships, as well as that of almost all other vehicles on all three planets. Power is generated by the great waterfalls of Tellus and Venus--water’s mighty scarce on Mars, of course, so most of our plants there use fuel--and is transmitted on light beams, by means of powerful fields of force to the receptors, wherever they may be. The individual transmitting fields and receptors are really simply matched-frequency units, each matching the electrical characteristics of some particular and unique beam of force. This beam is composed of Roeser’s Rays, in their energy aspect. It took a long time to work out this tight-beam transmission of power, but it was fairly simple after they got it.”

He took out a voluminous notebook, at the sight of which Nadia smiled.

“A computer might forget to dress, but you’d never catch one without a full magazine pencil and a lot of blank paper,” he grinned in reply and went on, writing as he talked.

“For any given frequency, f, and phase angle, theta, you integrate, between limits zero and pi divided by two, sine theta d...”

“Hold it--I’m sinking!” Nadia exclaimed. “I don’t integrate at all unless it is absolutely necessary. As long as you stick to general science, I’m right on your heels, but please lay off of integrations and all that--most especially stay away from those terrible electrical integrations. I always did think that they were the most poisonous kind known. I want only a general idea--that’s all that I can understand, anyway.”

“Sure, I forgot--guess I was getting in deeper than is necessary, especially since this whole thing of beam transmission is pretty crude yet and is bound to change a lot before long. There is so much loss that when we get more than a few hundred million kilometers away from a power-plant we lose reception entirely. But to get going again, the receptors receive the beam and from them the power is sent to the accumulators, where it is stored. These accumulators are an outgrowth of the storage battery. The theory of the accumulator is...”

“Lay off the theory, please!” the listener interrupted. “I understand perfectly without it. Energy is stored in the accumulators--you put it in and take it out. That’s all that is necessary.”

“I’d like to give you some of the theory--but, after all, it wouldn’t add much to your understanding of the working of things, and it might mix you up, as some of it is pretty deep stuff. Then, too, it would take a lot of time, and the rest of your friends would squawk if I kept you here indefinitely. From the accumulators, then, the power is fed to the converters, each of which is backed by a projector. The converters simply change the aspect of the rays, from the energy aspect to the material aspect. As soon as this is done, the highly-charged particles--or whatever they are--thus formed are repelled by the terrific stationary force maintained in the projector backing the converter. Each particle departs with a velocity supposed to be that of light, and the recoil upon the projector drives the vessel, or car, or whatever it is attached to. Still with me?”

“Struggling a little, but my nose is still above the surface. These particles, being so infinitesimally small that they cannot even be detected, go right through any substance without any effect--they are not even harmful.”

“Exactly. Now we are in position to go ahead with the lights, detectors, and so on. The energy aspect of the rays you can best understand as simply a vibration in the ether--an extremely high frequency one. While not rigidly scientific, that is close enough for you and me. Nobody knows what the stuff really is, and it cannot be explained or demonstrated by any model or concept in three-dimensional space. Its physical-mathematical interpretation, the only way in which it can be grasped at all, requires sixteen coordinates in four dimensions, and I don’t suppose you’d care to go into that.”

“I’ll say I wouldn’t!” she exclaimed, feelingly.

“Well, anyway, by the use of suitable fields of force it can be used as a carrier wave. Most of this stuff of the fields of force--how to carry the modulation up and down through all the frequency changes necessary--was figured out by the Martians ages ago. Used as a pure carrier wave, with a sender and a receiver at each end, it isn’t so bad--that’s why our communicator and radio systems work as well as they do. They are pretty good, really, but the ultra-light vision system is something else again. Sending the heterodyned wave through steel is easy, but breaking it up, so as to view an object and return the impulses, was an awful job and one that isn’t half done yet. We see things, after a fashion and at a distance of a few kilometers, by sending an almost parallel wave from a twin-projector to disintegrate and double back the viewing wave. That’s the way the lookout plates and lenses work, all over the ship--from the master-screens in the control room to the plates of the staterooms and lifeboats and the viewing-areas of the promenades. But the whole system is a rotten makeshift, and...”

“Just a minute!” exclaimed the girl. “I and everybody else have been thinking that everything is absolutely perfect; and yet every single thing you have talked about, you have ended up by describing as ‘unknown, ‘ ‘rudimentary, ‘ ‘temporary, ‘ or a ‘makeshift.’ You speak as though the entire system were a poor thing that will have to do until something better has been found, and that nobody knows anything about anything! How do you get that way?”

“By working with Brandon and Westfall. Those birds have got real brains and they’re on the track of something that will, in all probability, be as far ahead of Roeser’s Rays as our present system is ahead of the science of the seventeenth century.”

“Really?” she looked at him in astonishment. “Tell me about it.”

“Can’t be done,” he refused. “I don’t know much about it--even they didn’t know any too much about some of it when I had to come in. And what little I do know I can’t tell, because it isn’t mine.”

“But you’re working with them, aren’t you?”

“Yes, in the sense that a small boy helps his father build a house. They’re the brains--I simply do some figuring that they don’t want to waste time doing.”

Nadia, having no belief whatever in his modest disclaimer, but in secret greatly pleased by his attitude, replied:

“Of course you couldn’t say anything about an unfinished project--I shouldn’t have asked. Where do we go from here?”

“Down the lining of the hull, outside the passengers’ quarters to the upper dirigible projectors,” and he led the way down a series of steep steel stairways, through bulkheads and partitions of steel. “One thing I forgot to tell you about--the detectors. They’re worked on the same principle as the lights, and are just about as efficient. Instead, of light, though, they send out cones of electro-magnetic waves, which set up induced currents in any conductor encountered beyond our own shell. Since all dangerous meteorites have been shown to contain conducting material, that is enough to locate them, for radio finders automatically determine the direction, distance, and magnitude of the disturbance, and swing a light on it. That was what happened when that light swung toward us, back there in the prow.”

“Are there any of those life-boats, that I’ve heard discussed so much lately, near here?” asked the girl.

“Lots of ‘em--here’s one right here,” and at the next landing he opened a vacuum-insulated steel door, snapped on a light, and waved his hand. “You can’t see much of it from here, but it’s a complete space-ship in itself, capable of maintaining a dozen or fifteen persons during a two-weeks’ cruise in space.”

“Why isn’t it a good idea to retain them? Accidents are still possible, are they not?”

“Of course, and there is no question of doing away with them entirely. Modern ships, however, have only enough of them to take care of the largest number of persons ever to be carried by the vessel.”

“Has the Arcturus more than she needs?”

“I’ll say she has, and more of everything else, except room for pay-load.”

“I’ve heard them talking about junking her. I think it’s a shame.”

“So do I, in a way--you see, I helped design her and her sister-ship, the Sirius, which Brandon and Westfall are using as a floating laboratory. But times change, and the inefficient must go. She’s a good old tub, but she was built when everybody was afraid of space, and we had to put every safety factor into her that we could think of. As a result, she is four times as heavy as she should be, and that takes a lot of extra power. Her skin is too thick. She has too many batteries of accumulators, too many life-boats, too many bulkheads and air-breaks, too many and too much of everything. She is so built that if she should break up out in space, nobody would die if they lived through the shock--there are so many bulkheads, air-breaks, and life-boats that no matter how many pieces she broke up into, the survivors would find themselves in something able to navigate. That excessive construction is no longer necessary. Modern ships carry ten times the pay-load on one-quarter of the power that this old battle-wagon uses. Even though she’s only four years old, she’s a relic of the days when we used to slam through on the ecliptic route, right through all the meteoric stuff that is always there--trusting to heavy armor to ward off anything too small for the observers and detectors to locate. Now, with the observatories and check-stations out in space, fairly light armor is sufficient, as we route ourselves well away from the ecliptic and so miss all the heavy stuff. So, badly as I hate to see her go there, the old tub is bound for the junk-yard.”

A few more flights of stairs brought them to the upper band of dirigible projectors, which encircled the hull outside the passengers’ quarters, some sixty feet below the prow. They were heavy, search-light-like affairs mounted upon massive universal bearings, free to turn in any direction, and each having its converter nestling inside its prodigious field of force. Stevens explained that these projectors were used in turning the vessel and in dodging meteorites when necessary, and they went on through another almost invisible door into a hall and took an elevator down to the main corridor.

“Well, you’ve seen it, Miss Newton,” Stevens said regretfully, as he led her toward the captain’s office. “The lower half is full of heavy stuff--accumulators, machinery, driving projectors, and such junk, so that the center of gravity is below the center of action of the driving projectors. That makes stable flight possible. It’s all more or less like what we’ve just seen, and I don’t suppose you want to miss the dance--anyway, a lot of people want to dance with you.”

“Wouldn’t you just as soon show me through the lower half as dance?”

“Rather, lots!”

“So would I. I can dance any time, and I want to see everything. Let’s go!”

Down they went, past battery after battery of accumulators; climbing over and around the ever-increasing number of huge steel girders and bracers; through mazes of heavily insulated wiring and conduits; past mass after mass of automatic machinery which Stevens explained to his eager listener. They inspected one of the great driving projectors, which, built rigidly parallel to the axis of the ship and held immovably in place by enormous trusses of steel, revealed neither to the eye nor to the ear any sign of the terrific force it was exerting. Still lower they went, until the girl had been shown everything, even down to the bottom ultra-lights and stern braces.

“Tired?” Stevens asked, as the inspection was completed.

“Not very. It’s been quite a climb, but I’ve had a wonderful time.”

“So have I,” he declared, positively. “I know what--we’ll crawl up into one of these stern lifeboats and make us a cup of coffee before we climb back. With me?”

“‘Way ahead of you!” Nadia accepted the invitation enthusiastically, and they made their way to the nearest of the miniature space-cruisers. Here, although no emergency had been encountered in all the four years of the vessel’s life, they found everything in readiness, and the two soon had prepared and eaten a hearty luncheon.

“Well, I can’t think of any more excuses for monopolizing you, Miss Newton, so I suppose I’ll have to take you back. Believe me, I’ve enjoyed this more than you can realize--I’ve...”

He broke off and listened, every nerve taut. “What was that?” he exclaimed.

“What was what? I didn’t hear anything?”

“Something screwy somewhere! I felt a vibration, and anything that’d make this mountain of steel even quiver must have given us one gosh-awful nudge. There’s another!”

The girl, painfully tense, felt only a barely perceptible tremor, but the computer, knowing far better than she the inconceivable strength and mass of that enormous structure of solidly braced hardened steel, sprang into action. Leaping to the small dirigible look-out plate, he turned on the power and swung it upward.

“Great suffering snakes!” he ejaculated, then stood mute, for the plate revealed a terrible sight. The entire nose of the gigantic craft had been sheared off in two immense slices as though clipped off by a gigantic sword, and even as they stared, fascinated, at the sight, the severed slices were drifting slowly away. Swinging the view along the plane of cleavage, Stevens made out a relatively tiny ball of metal, only fifty feet or so in diameter, at a distance of perhaps a mile. From this ball there shot a blinding plane of light, and the Arcturus fell apart at the midsection, the lower half separating clean from the upper portion, which held the passengers. Leaving the upper half intact, the attacker began slicing the lower, driving half into thin, disk-shaped sections. As that incandescent plane of destruction made its first flashing cut through the body of the Arcturus, accompanied by an additional pyrotechnic display of severed and short-circuited high-tension leads, Stevens and Nadia suddenly found themselves floating weightless in the air of the room. Still gripping the controls of the look-out plate, Stevens caught the white-faced girl with one hand, drew her down beside him, and held her motionless while his keen mind flashed over all the possibilities of the situation and planned his course of action.

“They’re apparently slicing us pretty evenly, and by the looks of things, one cut is coming right about here,” he explained rapidly, as he found a flashlight and drew his companion through the door and along a narrow passage. Soon he opened another door and led her into a tiny compartment so low that they could not stand upright--a mere cubicle of steel. Carefully closing the door, he fingered dials upon each of the walls of the cell, then folded himself up into a comfortable position, instructed Nadia to do the same, and snapped off the light.