Out Around Rigel
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Robert H. Wilson >> Out Around Rigel
Transcriber's notes are indicated in the text by [TN-#].
[Illustration: _I caught his hand and pulled him to safety._]
Out Around Rigel
By Robert H. Wilson
[Note: An astounding chronicle of two Lunarians' conquest of time and
interstellar space.]
The sun had dropped behind the Grimaldi plateau, although for a day
twilight would linger over the Oceanus Procellarum. The sky was a hazy
blue, and out over the deeper tinted waves the full Earth swung. All the
long half-month it had hung there above the horizon, its light dimmed by
the sunshine, growing from a thin crescent to its full disk three times
as broad as that of the sun at setting. Now in the dusk it was a great
silver lamp hanging over Nardos, the Beautiful, the City Built on the
Water. The light glimmered over the tall white towers, over the white
ten-mile-long adamantine bridge running from Nardos to the shore, and
lit up the beach where we were standing, with a brightness that seemed
almost that of day.
"Once more, Garth," I said. "I'll get that trick yet."
The skin of my bare chest still smarted from the blow of his wooden
fencing sword. If it had been the real two-handed Lunarian dueling
sword, with its terrible mass behind a curved razor edge, the blow would
have produced a cut deep into the bone. It was always the same, ever
since Garth and I had fenced as boys with crooked laths. Back to back,
we could beat the whole school, but I never had a chance against him.
Perhaps one time in ten--
"On guard!"
The silvered swords whirled in the Earth-light. I nicked him on one
wrist, and had to duck to escape his wild swing at my head. The wooden
blades were now locked by the hilts above our heads. When he stepped
back to get free, I lunged and twisted his weapon. In a beautiful
parabola, Garth's sword sailed out into the water, and he dropped to the
sand to nurse his right wrist.
"Confound your wrestling, Dunal. If you've broken my arm on the eve of
my flight--"
"It's not even a sprain. Your wrists are weak. And I supposed you've
always been considerate of me? Three broken ribs!"
"For half a cent--"
* * * * *
He was on his feet, and then Kelvar came up and laid her hand on his
shoulder. Until a few minutes before she had been swimming in the surf,
watching us. The Earth-light shimmered over her white skin, still
faintly moist, and blazed out in blue sparkles from the jewels of the
breastplates and trunks she had put on.
When she touched Garth, and he smiled, I wanted to smash in his dark
face and then take the beating I would deserve. Yet, if she preferred
him-- [TN-1]And the two of us had been friends before she was born. I
put out my hand.
"Whatever happens, Garth, we'll still be friends?"
"Whatever happens."
We clasped hands.
"Garth," Kelvar said, "it's getting dark. Show us your ship before you
go."
"All right." He had always been like that--one minute in a black rage,
the next perfectly agreeable. He now led the way up to a cliff hanging
over the sea.
"There," said Garth, "is the _Comet_. Our greatest step in conquering
distance. After I've tried it out, we can go in a year to the end of the
universe. But, for a starter, how about a thousand light-years around
Rigel in six months?" His eyes were afire. Then he calmed down.
"Anything I can show you?"
[Note: Editor's Note: The manuscript, of which a translation is here
presented, was discovered by the rocket-ship expedition to the moon
three years ago. It was found in its box by the last crumbling ruins of
the great bridge mentioned in the narrative. Its final translation is a
tribute at once to the philological skill of the Earth and to the
marvelous dictionary provided by Dunal, the Lunarian. Stars and lunar
localities will be given their traditional Earth names; and measures of
time, weight, and distance have been reduced, in round numbers, to
terrestrial equivalents. Of the space ship described, the _Comet_, no
trace has been found. It must be buried under the rim of one of the
hundreds of nearby Lunar craters--the result, as some astronomers have
long suspected and as Dunal's story verifies, of a great swarm of
meteors striking the unprotected, airless moon.]
* * * * *
I had seen the _Comet_ before, but never so close. With a hull of
shining helio-beryllium--the new light, inactive alloy of a metal and a
gas--the ship was a cylinder about twenty feet long, by fifteen in
diameter, while a pointed nose stretched five feet farther at each end.
Fixed in each point was a telescopic lens, while there were windows
along the sides and at the top--all made, Garth informed us, of another
form of the alloy almost as strong as the opaque variety. Running
half-way out each end were four "fins" which served to apply the power
driving the craft. A light inside showed the interior to be a single
room, ten feet high at the center of its cylindrical ceiling, with a
level floor.
"How do you know this will be the bottom?" I asked, giving the vessel a
shove to roll it over. But it would not budge. Garth laughed.
"Five hundred pounds of mercury and the disintegrators are under that
floor, while out in space I have an auxiliary gravity engine to keep my
feet there."
"You see, since your mathematical friends derived their identical
formulas for gravity and electromagnetism, my job was pretty easy. As
you know, a falling body follows the line of least resistance in a field
of distortion of space caused by mass. I bend space into another such
field by electromagnetic means, and the _Comet_ flies down the track.
Working the mercury disintegrators at full power, I can get an
acceleration of two hundred miles per second, which will build up the
speed at the midpoint of my trip to almost four thousand times that of
light. Then I'll have to start slowing down, but at the average speed
the journey will take only six months or so."
* * * * *
"But can anyone stand that acceleration?" Kelvar asked.
"I've had it on and felt nothing. With a rocket exhaust shoving the
ship, it couldn't be done, but my gravitational field attracts the
occupant of the _Comet_ just as much as the vessel itself."
"You're sure," I interrupted, "that you have enough power to keep up the
acceleration?"
"Easily. There's a two-thirds margin of safety."
"And you haven't considered that it may get harder to push? You know the
increase of mass with velocity. You can't take one-half of the
relativity theory without the other. And they've actually measured the
increase of weight in an electron."
"The electron never knew it; it's all a matter of reference points. I
can't follow the math, but I know that from the electron's standards it
stayed exactly the same weight. Anything else is nonsense."
"Well, there may be a flaw in the reasoning, but as they've worked it
out, nothing can go faster than light. As you approach that velocity,
the mass keeps increasing, and with it the amount of energy required for
a new increase in speed. At the speed of light, the mass would be
infinite, and hence no finite energy could get you any further."
"Maybe so. It won't take long to find out."
A few of the brightest stars had begun to appear. We could just see the
parallelogram of Orion, with red Betelguese at one corner, and across
from it Rigel, scintillant like a blue diamond.
"See," Garth said, pointing at it. "Three months from now, that's where
I'll be. The first man who dared to sail among the stars."
"Only because you don't let anyone else share the glory and the danger."
"Why should I? But you wouldn't go, anyway."
"Will you let me?"
I had him there.
"On your head be it. The _Comet_ could hold three or four in a pinch,
and I have plenty of provisions. If you really want to take the
chance--"
"It won't be the first we've taken together."
"All right. We'll start in ten minutes." He went inside the ship.
* * * * *
"Don't go," Kelvar whispered, coming into the _Comet's_ shadow. "Tell
him anything, but don't go."
"I've got to. I can't go back on my word. He'd think I was afraid."
"Haven't you a right to be?"
"Garth is my friend and I'm going with him."
"All right. But I wish you wouldn't."
From inside came the throb of engines.
"Kelvar," I said, "you didn't worry when only Garth was going."
"No."
"And there's less danger with two to keep watch."
"I know, but still...."
"You are afraid for _me_?"
"I am afraid for you."
My arm slipped around her, there in the shadow.
"And when I come back, Kelvar, we'll be married?"
In answer, she kissed me. Then Garth was standing in the doorway of the
_Comet_.
"Dunal, where are you?"
We separated and came out of the shadow. I went up the plank to the
door, kicking it out behind me. Kelvar waved, and I called something or
other to her. Then the door clanged shut. Seated before the control
board at the front of the room, Garth held the switch for the two
projectors.
"Both turned up," he yelled over the roar of the generators. His hands
swung over and the noise died down, but nothing else seemed to have
happened. I turned back again to look out the little window fixed in the
door.
* * * * *
Down far below, I could see for a moment the city of Nardos with its
great white bridge, and a spot that might be Kelvar. Then there was only
the ocean, sparkling in the Earth-light, growing smaller, smaller. And
then we had shot out of the atmosphere into the glare of the sun and a
thousand stars.
On and up we went, until the moon was a crescent with stars around it.
Then Garth threw the power forward.
"Might as well turn in," he told me. "There'll be nothing interesting
until we get out of the solar system and I can put on real speed. I'll
take the first trick."
"How long watches shall we stand?"
"Eighteen hours ought to match the way we have been living. If you have
another preference--"
"No, that will be all right. And I suppose I might as well get in some
sleep now."
I was not really sleepy, but only dazed a little by the adventure. I
fixed some things on the floor by one of the windows and lay down,
switching out the light. Through a top window the sunlight slanted down
to fall around Garth, at his instrument board, in a bright glory. From
my window I could see the Earth and the gleaming stars.
The Earth was smaller than I had ever seen it before. It seemed to be
moving backward a little[TN-2], and even more, to be changing phase. I
closed my eyes, and when I opened them again, sleepily, the bright area
was perceptibly smaller. If I could stay awake long enough, there would
be only a crescent again. If I could stay awake--But I could not....
* * * * *
Only the rattling of dishes as Garth prepared breakfast brought me back
to consciousness. I got to my feet sheepishly.
"How long have I slept?"
"Twenty hours straight. You looked as if you might have gone on forever.
It's the lack of disturbance to indicate time. I got in a little myself,
once we were out of the solar system."
A sandwich in one hand, I wandered over the vessel. It was reassuringly
solid and concrete. And yet there was something lacking.
"Garth," I asked, "what's become of the sun?"
"I thought you'd want to know that." He led me to the rear telescope.
"But I don't see anything."
"You haven't caught on yet. See that bright yellowish star on the edge
of the constellation Scorpio. That's it."
Involuntarily, I gasped. "Then--how far away are we?"
"I put on full acceleration fifteen hours ago, when we passed Neptune,
and we have covered thirty billion miles--three hundred times as far as
from the moon to the sun, but only one half of one per cent of a
light-year."
I was speechless, and Garth led me back to the control board. He pointed
out the acceleration control, now turned up to its last notch forward;
he also showed me the dials which were used to change our direction.
"Just keep that star on the cross hairs. It's Pi Orionis, a little out
of our course, but a good target since it is only twenty-five
light-years away. Half the light is deflected on this screen, with a
delicate photo-electric cell at its center. The instant the light of the
star slips off it, a relay is started which lights a red lamp here, and
in a minute sounds a warning bell. That indicator over there shows our
approach to any body. It works by the interaction of the object's
gravitational field with that of my projector, and we can spot anything
sizable an hour away. Sure you've got everything?"
* * * * *
It all seemed clear. Then I noticed at the top three clock-like dials;
one to read days, another to record the speeds of light, and the third
to mark light-years traveled.
"These can't really work?" I said. "We have no way to check our speed
with outer space."
"Not directly. This is geared with clockwork to represent an estimate
based on the acceleration. If your theory is right, then the dials are
all wrong."
"And how long do you expect to go ahead without knowing the truth?"
"Until we ought to be at Pi Orionis. At two weeks and twenty-five
light-years by the dials, if we aren't there we'll start back. By your
figuring, we shouldn't be yet one light-year on the way. Anything more?"
"No, I think I can manage it."
"Wake me if anything's wrong. And look out for dark stars." Then he had
left me there at the controls. In five minutes he was asleep and the
whole ship was in my hands.
* * * * *
For hours nothing happened. Without any control of mine, the ship went
straight ahead. I could get up and walk about, with a weather eye on the
board, and never was there the flash of a danger light. But I was unable
to feel confident, and went back to look out through the glass.
The stars were incredibly bright and clear. Right ahead were Betelguese
and Rigel, and the great nebula of Orion still beyond. There was no
twinkling, but each star a bright, steady point of light. And if Garth's
indicators were correct, we were moving toward them at a speed now
seventy-five times that of light itself. If they were correct.... How
could one know, before the long two weeks were over?
But before I could begin to think of any plan, my eye was caught by the
red lamp flashing on the panel. I pressed the attention button before
the alarm could ring, then started looking for the body we were in
danger of striking. The position indicators pointed straight ahead, but
I could see nothing. For ten minutes I peered through the telescope, and
still no sign. The dials put the thing off a degree or so to the right
now, but that was too close. In five more minutes I would swing straight
up and give whatever it was a wide berth.
I looked out again. In the angle between the cross hairs, wasn't there a
slight haze? In a moment it was clear. A comet, apparently, the two of
us racing toward each other. Bigger it grew and bigger, hurtling
forward. Would we hit?
The dials put it up a little and far off to the right, but it was still
frightening. The other light had come on, too, and I saw that we had
been pulled off our course by the comet's attraction. I threw the nose
over, past on the other side for leeway, then straightened up as the
side-distance dial gave a big jump away. Though the gaseous globe,
tailless of course away from the sun, showed as big as the full Earth,
the danger was past.
* * * * *
As I watched, the comet vanished from the field of the telescope. Five
minutes, perhaps, with the red danger light flickering all the time.
Then, with a ghastly flare through the right hand windows, it had passed
us.
Garth sat straight up. "What happened?" he yelled.
"Just a comet. I got by all right."
He settled back, having been scarcely awake, and I turned to the board
again. The danger light had gone out, but the direction indicator was
burning. The near approach of the comet had thrown us off our course by
several degrees. I straightened the ship up easily, and had only a
little more difficulty in stopping a rocking motion. Then again the
empty hours of watching, gazing into the stars.
Precisely at the end of eighteen hours, Garth awakened, as if the
consummation of a certain number of internal processes had set off a
little alarm clock in his brain. We were forty-one hours out, with a
speed, according to the indicator, of one hundred and twenty-eight times
that of light, and a total distance covered of slightly over one quarter
of a light-year. A rather small stretch, compared to the 466 light-years
we had to go. But when I went back for a look out of the rear telescope,
the familiar stars seemed to have moved the least bit closer together,
and the sun was no brighter than a great number of them.
I slept like a log, but awakened a little before my trick was due.
* * * * *
Exactly on schedule, fourteen days and some hours after we had started
off, we passed Pi Orionis. For long there had been no doubt in my mind
that, whatever the explanation, our acceleration was holding steady. In
the last few hours the star swept up to the brilliance of the sun, then
faded again until it was no brighter than Venus. Venus! Our sun itself
had been a mere dot in the rear telescope until the change in our course
threw it out of the field of vision.
At sixty-five light-years, twenty-three days out, Beta Eridani was
almost directly in our path for Rigel. Slightly less than a third of the
distance to the midpoint, in over half the time. But our speed was still
increasing 200 miles a second every second, almost four times the speed
of light in an hour. Our watches went on with a not altogether
disagreeable monotony.
There was no star to mark the middle of our journey. Only, toward the
close of one of my watches, a blue light which I had never noticed came
on beside the indicator dials, and I saw that we had covered 233
light-years, half the estimated distance to Rigel. The speed marker
indicated 3975 times the speed of light. I wakened Garth.
"You could have done it yourself," he complained, sleepily, "but I
suppose it's just as well."
He went over to the board and started warming up the rear gravity
projector.
"We'll turn one off as the other goes on. Each take one control, and go
a notch at a time." He began counting, "One, two, three ..."
On the twentieth count, my dial was down to zero, his up to maximum
deceleration, and I pulled out my switch. Garth snapped sideways a lever
on the indicators. Though nothing seemed to happen, I knew that the
speed dial would creep backward, and the distance dial progress at a
slower and slower rate. While I was trying to see the motion, Garth had
gone back to bed. I turned again to the glass and looked out at Rigel,
on the cross hairs, and Kappa Orionis, over to the left, and the great
nebula reaching over a quarter of the view with its faint gaseous
streamers.
* * * * *
And so we swept on through space, with Rigel a great blue glory ahead,
and new stars, invisible at greater distances, flaring up in front of us
and then fading into the background as we passed. For a long time we had
been able to see that Rigel, as inferred from spectroscopic evidence,
was a double star--a fainter, greener blue companion revolving with it
around their common center of gravity. Beyond Kappa Orionis, three
hundred light-years from the sun, the space between the two was quite
evident. Beyond four hundred light-years, the brilliance of the vast
star was so great that it dimmed all the other stars by comparison, and
made the nebula seem a mere faint gauze. And yet even with this gradual
change, our arrival was a surprise.
When he relieved me at my watch, Garth seemed dissatisfied with our
progress. "It must be farther than they've figured. I'll stick at
twenty-five times light speed, and slow down after we get there by
taking an orbit."
"I'd have said it was nearer than the estimate," I tried to argue, but
was too sleepy to remember my reasons. Propped up on one elbow, I looked
around and out at the stars. There was a bright splash of light, I
noticed, where the telescope concentrated the radiation of Rigel at one
spot on the screen. I slept, and then Garth was shouting in my ear:
"We're there!"
I opened my eyes, blinked, and shut them again in the glare.
"I've gone around three or four times trying to slow down. We're there,
and there's a planet to land on."
* * * * *
At last I could see. Out the window opposite me, Rigel was a blue-white
disk half the size of the sun, but brighter, with the companion star a
sort of faint reflection five or ten degrees to the side. And still
beyond, as I shaded my eyes, I could see swimming in the black a speck
with the unmistakable glow of reflected light.
With both gravity projectors in readiness, we pulled out of our orbit
and straight across toward the planet, letting the attraction of Rigel
fight against our still tremendous speed. For a while, the pull of the
big star was almost overpowering. Then we got past, and into the
gravitational field of the planet. We spiralled down around it, looking
for a landing place and trying to match our speed with its rotational
velocity.
From rather unreliable observations, the planet seemed a good deal
smaller than the moon, and yet so dense as to have a greater
gravitational attraction. The atmosphere was cloudless, and the surface
a forbidding expanse of sand. The globe whirled at a rate that must give
it a day of approximately five hours. We angled down, picking a spot
just within the lighted area.
A landing was quite feasible. As we broke through the atmosphere, we
could see that the sand, although blotched with dark patches here and
there, was comparatively smooth. At one place there was a level
outcropping of rock, and over this we hung. It was hard work, watching
through the single small port in the floor as we settled down. Finally
the view was too small to be of any use. I ran to the side window, only
to find my eyes blinded by Rigel's blaze. Then we had landed, and almost
at the same moment Rigel set. Half overlapped by the greater star, the
faint companion had been hidden in its glare. Now, in the dusk, a corner
of it hung ghostlike on the horizon, and then too had disappeared.
* * * * *
I flashed on our lights, while Garth cut out the projector and the floor
gravity machine. The increase in weight was apparent, but not
particularly unpleasant. After a few minutes of walking up and down I
got used to it.
Through a stop-cock in the wall, Garth had drawn in a tube of gas from
the atmosphere outside, and was analyzing it with a spectroscope.
"We can go out," he said. "It's unbreathable, but we'll be able to use
the space suits. Mostly fluorine. It would eat your lungs out like
that!"
"And the suits?"
"Fortunately, they've been covered with helio-beryllium paint, and the
helmet glass is the same stuff. Not even that atmosphere can touch it. I
suppose there can be no life on the place. With all this sand, it would
have to be based on silicon instead of carbon--and it would have to
breathe fluorine!"
He got out the suits--rather like a diver's with the body of
metal-painted cloth, and the helmet of the metal itself. On the
shoulders was an air supply cylinder. The helmets were fixed with radio,
so we could have talked to each other even in airless space. We said
almost anything to try it out.
"Glad you brought two, and we don't have to explore in shifts."
"Yes, I was prepared for emergencies."
"Shall we wait for daylight to go out?"
"I can't see why. And these outfits will probably feel better in the
cool. Let's see."
* * * * *
We shot a searchlight beam out the window. There was a slight drop down
from the rock where we rested, then the sandy plain stretching out. Only
far off were those dark patches that looked like old seaweed on a
dried-up ocean bed, and might prove dangerous footing. The rest seemed
hard packed.
My heart was pounding as we went into the air-lock and fastened the
inner door behind us.
"We go straight out now," Garth explained. "Coming back, it will be
necessary to press this button and let the pump get rid of the
poisonous, air before going in."
I opened the outer door and started to step out, then realized that
there was a five-foot drop to the ground.
"Go ahead and jump," Garth said. "There's a ladder inside I should have
brought, but it would be too much trouble to go back through the lock
for it. Either of us can jump eight feet at home, and we'll get back up
somehow."
I jumped, failing to allow for the slightly greater gravity, and fell
sprawling. Garth got down more successfully, in spite of a long package
of some sort he carried in his hand.
Scrambling down from the cliff and walking out on the sand, I tried to
get used to the combination of greater weight and the awkward suit. If I
stepped very deliberately it was all right, but an attempt to run sank
my feet in the sand and brought me up staggering. There was no trouble
seeing through the glass of my helmet over wide angles. Standing on the
elevation by the _Comet_, his space-suit shining in the light from the
windows, Garth looked like a metallic monster, some creature of this
strange world. And I must have presented to him much the same
appearance, silhouetted dark and forbidding against the stars.