Operation: Outer Space Part 13

"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 s.p.a.ce platform to the moon. The pilot left the controls and in an accustomed fas.h.i.+on 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.

"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 s.h.i.+p. We have to find out how fast it goes with how much field and how much rocket-thrust. 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 s.h.i.+p'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 s.p.a.ceways, 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 b.u.t.tons 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 h.e.l.l 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 a.s.sure you it's true. We are linked to you by the 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 a.s.sociation 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."