The Cold Equations (31 page)

"How about the diamond dust in the water?" Taylor asked.

"Only clean steam will go to the cylinder, and the diamond dust won't affect the boiler as lime would. Besides, we have our water filters on the ship's tanks."

Wilfred picked up the needle and let it swing from the thread, holding the magnet under it. "If this magnet represented this planet, and its magnetism was the force of gravity, with this needle representing our ship, fitted with some gadget to make it antigravitic at the lower end as this needle is antimagnetic—"

He let the needle swing on the thread, bouncing away from the repulsion of the magnet, then swinging in again, to be stopped and driven away by the invisible force.

"The invisible barrier," he said. "What is it? It isn't matter—not as we know matter. We call it a force, but just exactly what is it that no material—glass, metal or anything else—can bar?"

"That's the question," Taylor said. "It's going to be a hard one to answer."

"It will," Cooke said, "but we know the answer is there if we can find it. The power we need to move this ship is all around us; we'll be looking for the secret of a power that we
know
exists."

"And if we continued to hunt for uranium, we'd be looking for something that all the evidence shows does
not
exist," Blake said.

Lenson shoved back his chair and got to his feet. "Now that we know what we want to do, let's get busy," he said. "It will take all five of us quite a while to build that boiler and engine, so let's get started right now."

"I agree," Cooke said. "We're headed for an unpleasant end at a hundred miles a second—the Bird of Time has but a little way to fly—"

"And Lo!—the Bird is on the Wing!" Wilfred finished, a rare smile on his pugnacious young face as he shoved back his own chair.

* * *

The generator was lowered from its hanging position on the wall and fastened to a new-laid flooring of steel. A gear box was made from the gears of the ship's elevator and the portholes of the drive room were equipped with glassite windows; windows which were rendered sub-translucent by the first sandstorm, but would still admit sufficient light for working. The boiler and engine construction progressed slowly, with the small lathe and the limited kinds of material available, but they worked steadily while the yellow star advanced farther and farther ahead of their own sun. It gleamed in the dawn sky a full hour in advance of the rising of their sun when they began the building of the engine. On the day they completed the engine it was dispelling the eastern blackness two hours before the blue-white sun brought the first touch of the rainbow dawn and almost three hours before the sun, itself, appeared.

Blake, Cooke and Lenson toasted the steam engine on the day they completed it and gave it a successful trial run; a modest toast of one small glass each, due to the limited amount of grain alcohol in the medicine locker. Taylor and Wilfred, who never drank, had already gone into the central room to begin the job of converting it into a laboratory.

"She's not pretty," Cooke said, indicating the shapeless boiler and engine with his empty glass, "but beauty is as beauty does. And she spun that generator like a top."

"She did," Lenson said. "As you said of the hydraulic ram—those old-timers weren't exactly fools."

"We have all the power we need whenever we happen to need it," Blake said. "Next, as soon as we get the central room converted, will be to put our ideas to the acid test."

"They say the acid test is always sour," Cooke said. "We'll have to make an exception of that rule. And have you noticed our big yellow star? It's over forty degrees in advance of our sun, now—gives the illusion of traveling away from our sun, except that it keeps getting brighter."

"We're already a fifth of the way to it," Blake said.

"The nova created when Aurora goes into the yellow sun should be spectacular," Cooke went on. "And then what happens when our big blue-white sun goes into the nova? Will it produce a super-nova? No man has ever stood off and seen such a thing, you know."

"Neither will we if we don't get busy," Lenson said. "Time, tide and Aurora's rendezvous wait for no man—and here we stand with empty glasses in our hands when we should be working."

"You're right," Cooke said, turning to go. "Holding an
empty
glass is about the most useless thing a man ever did."

* * *

The central room of the ship was converted into a laboratory—or as near to a laboratory as their limited equipment would permit—and large glassite windows were fitted into holes cut in the hull; a much better form of illumination than the improvised oil lamps they had been using.

Ideas were presented in the days to come; some that were no more than the repetition of known experiments and some that were contrary to accepted theories of magnetic and gravitic principles. The latter were, at first, presented somewhat self-consciously and Blake and Cooke did their best to discourage such reluctance to depart from conventional thinking. As the days merged into scores of days the reluctance to present unorthodox theories vanished and they all five adopted the policy of accepting each new theory with, as Cooke put it: "The assumption that every theory, no matter how fantastic, is innocent of the crime of invalidity until proven guilty."

Each experiment was given a number, preceded by the letter X for "Experimental," and the data gained by the experiment filed away. Blake, whose mathematical computations as a mining engineer had never required more than trigonometric and logarithmic tables, became as proficient as the others. His lack of advanced technical learning was, in a way, no disadvantage—he had nothing to unlearn. He absorbed all the data available concerning the actual, observed behavior of field-type forces and rejected the adoption of any preconceived theories of the causes for such behavior, keeping his mind open for the unbiased inspection of new concepts.

Thirty days passed and then another thirty, while the yellow star grew slowly brighter and widened the apparent distance between itself and their own sun—the apparent widening of the distance that was so belied by the yellow star's increasing brightness. The first enthusiasm of Cooke, Lenson and Wilfred gave way to a quietness and they worked longer hours. Taylor betrayed no particular emotion but he was up early and to bed late.

Summer solstice came and the sun ceased its apparent northward progress and began to creep to the south, almost imperceptibly at first. The desert winds came with greater frequency after solstice, hot and searing and bringing their ever-present burden of sand and dust.

They had been on Aurora four months when Cooke, in a moment of grim humor, chalked a huge calendar on the wall of the laboratory. He made it thirty days wide and five rows deep. Each day that passed would be filled in with red chalk and the red squares would move across the calendar, row upon row, warning the five men who labored in the room of the shortness of their time.

Two lines of thirty days each were chalked a solid red when they found the first key to the secret that meant their lives.

* * *

X117 lay on the laboratory table, a complex assembly of coils and electronic apparatus, with a small blue-white diamond swinging in a tiny arc just within the focal point of the induction fields. The diamond hung on a long thread, attached to a delicate spring scale with a large dial.

Cooke glanced over the assembly, then raked his heavy hair back from his face and grinned at the others. "This," he said, "should be what we've been looking for."

"You've said that every time," Wilfred reminded him.

"Let's find out," Blake suggested, feeling his usual impatience to learn as soon as possible if their efforts had again been in vain. "We have full steam pressure and our engine is ready to spin the generator whenever you close the switch."

"That's what I say—let's get the suspense over with," Lenson said. He closed the switch that would open the steam engine's governors and the faint chuffing of it in the drive room became a fast pounding. The needle on the generator output gauge began to climb rapidly and all eyes were transferred to the dial of the spring scale.

"Twenty seconds," Cooke said, his attention alternating between the diamond and his watch. "It should have built up an effect by then. If it hasn't, it will look like another failure and I'll have to guess again on the success of the next one."

No one else spoke as they watched the diamond swing gently from the long thread. It was only a small one, not more than ten grains in weight; such a small and insignificant mass to resist all their efforts to move it.

"Ten seconds," Cooke intoned. "Eight—cross your fingers and say a little prayer—three—two—
now!
"

The diamond continued to swing in its tiny arc and the pointer on the scale remained motionless. No one moved nor took their eyes off the diamond, even when the smell of scorched insulation became noticeable.

"It's overloaded, now," Lenson said, but made no move to open the switch.

"Give it more," Blake ordered. "Give it the full output of the generator—let's be sure of it, and let it burn if it wants to."

Lenson snapped another switch shut and the full output of the big generator surged through X117. A coil went out in a flash of blue fire and someone cried out incredulously.

In the brief instant before the coil disappeared the diamond moved—
up
.

"
It moved!
" Cooke exclaimed jubilantly. "We're going to have our drive!"

There was a minute of quite natural elation and confused babble of excited talk during which Blake remembered to open the switch again. The muted pounding of the steam engine died away and the babble resolved itself into coherent conversation.

"We're on the right track, at last," Blake said decisively.

"We've just done something all our science has never before accomplished," Wilfred said. "We've created a force of antigravity."

"We have a long way to go," Taylor said. "We've built up a force of antigravity that lifted a diamond weighing ten grains—and it took the full output of our ship's generator to do it. But we now have a proven result to go on; we have the beginning of an understanding of the basic principles."

"When we get it where we want it, I doubt that it will bear any resemblance to
this
," Blake said, indicating the assembly on the table with his hand. "This just happened to be the easiest way to produce a little of the force we were looking for. Like, you might say, the easiest way to produce electricity is to stroke a cat. But you wouldn't try to supply electricity for a city by having a million men engaged in stroking a million cats."

"I have a theory," Cooke said. "Once we learn a little more about this force we created we can try something else—we'll try reversing the gravitic flow, rather than building up a counter-flow. I want to work on that theory and see what the rest of you think of it. Such a system should require almost no power since no force would be created, merely reversed."

"The perfect ship's drive would be a field-type drive," Wilfred said, "for more reasons than one. The reason I have in mind at the moment is this: there would be no limit to the speed of acceleration since the ship and its occupants would be enveloped in the driving force. It wouldn't, to the passengers, be like the rocket drive where they're actually pushed along by the seat of their pants."

Blake nodded. "I've been thinking of the same thing. I suppose we all have, because the only way we're going to escape that nova is to accelerate at an unheard-of velocity. We can do that when we perfect what we're working on; with our ship and ourselves enveloped in the driving force we can accelerate
immediately
to any speed, and with no sensation of accelerating at all."

"No more acceleration hammocks and anti-acceleration drugs," Cooke said. "No more long periods of reaching maximum acceleration, then other long periods of decelerating. We really have something—or will have when we're through." He looked over at Taylor. "How much time to we have? Did your latest observations give us as much as a day more?"

Taylor glanced at the calendar Cooke had chalked on the wall. "Your calendar still holds good—the last day you have on it will be our last day."

"Eighty-five days—that's not many," Lenson said.

"No, but we're going to make progress from now on," Blake said. "We have something to work on; we've opened a door that no one has ever opened before."

"And if there's another door behind the one we opened?" Lenson asked.

It was Cooke who answered, the finality of conviction in his voice. "Then we'll open that one, too."

* * *

Lenson's question proved to be not an idle one; there was a door behind the one they had opened. In the countergravity they had created lay the key to the second door, the reversal of gravity, but it eluded them as the days went by. They repeated X117 and variations of it until the experimental-data record bore the number, X135. Cooke's theory was examined and re-examined and no fallacy could be found, neither could any other theory be constructed that would fit the facts they had discovered. They accepted Cooke's theory as valid, and no one questioned the possibility of reversing gravitic flows with a negligible amount of power.

All were convinced of ultimate success—if they could but have the time.

The days fled by while they tried and tried again. They worked longer hours, all of them thinner and the bulldog stubbornness on Wilfred's face becoming more pronounced. The yellow star crept farther ahead of their own sun, growing brighter as it went, and the red-chalked squares marched across the calendar. Their determination increased as their days of grace melted away; a determination expressed by a silent intensity of effort by all but Cooke, whose intensified efforts were accompanied by considerable cheerful speculations upon the many pleasures New Earth would have to offer them on their return.

Blake wondered if Cooke's faith in their eventual success was as firm as he insisted, or if it was only a psychological attempt to improve not only the morale of the others but also his own. The red squares had crept across two more rows and over half-way across a third when he got his answer.