Space Blackout — Reading Companion

Jim looked bewildered. "Maybe it's too much," he said, "but such a speed is incredible."

"There is no limit to speed," Shadrak told us. "The problem is of acceleration, and deceleration. You have that problem in handling the Pelios, which rides energy beams at the speed of light. Frequencies, whether of sound or light, as instances, are constant. Therefore we employ this fact in accelerating. We superimpose frequencies against frequencies, repelling power, one from the other. The result is a constant, increasing ratio. In effect, Jim--and you, Jerry--will grasp it much easier in this manner. If you had a machine throwing a jet of water, and it touched an opposing jet of water, your propulsion would build up till the limits of the energy from the opposing jets were reached. Suppose those jets continued to reach out. As light frequencies, till you built up your maximum. In a vacuum your speed would continue at that maximum velocity till you chose to decelerate. Now deceleration is effected by the same principle. We do it by hitching to our sun and reaching the maximum in building up speed. In like manner, another sun can be used to decelerate, by reversing the process.

"But enough of that," Shadrak resumed. "Your ship will be robot controlled. Our own master navigator will get telescreened charts of your course. Your job will begin when you land, I fear. The planet of Spor enters the Noir within eighteen months, and a sudden reaction in that hundred thousand light year wide mass could reduce the engulfing to eighteen weeks."

"What does this Noir mean, swallowing up Spor?" I fired that shot. And it was Jim who answered.

"Noir's the light absorbing element nobody has lived to analyze. We know it absorbs all organic life as it does light, electricity, even sound. It's the black scourge of space."

"And we're going to play around it, eh? To bring back the descendants of the lost Atlantis. And where do they go, providing we take 'em off?"

Shadrak waved a hand vaguely over the horizon. "Here, till we find a planet suitable. You see, we're responsible. We moved them to Spor. Now it's our duty to remove them again."

Jim spoke. "We're ready, whenever you are sir."

Now a lot happened before we curved around the sinister prong of the Noir, the Milky Way lost behind, even Orion and his companions. We had ceased marveling at the repellor motors, operated within compact cases by the efficient robot machines. And I must put in a word for the way they lifted our big ship from Mars. You don't use rockets any more. They catapult you, shooting you ten thousand miles outward with rocket tubes sunk into the ground. You use inverted, concave affairs to catch the power. And too, we had our first acquaintance with the auxiliary repellors used inside the ship to offset inertia. This gave us the same gravity as Earth. And Shadrak called at regular periods on the relief screen, the new device that gives solidity to an image. He told us a lot about the transplanted sons and daughters of ancient Atlantis, and we had the mentameters to make immediate contact with their language and knowledge. Shadrak had thought of everything.

The solar system which Shadrak called Maj, crawled around the crescent of Noir, and we sighted the third planet, giving a ruddy glow. That gave us a kick, but I felt a shiver as I watched that ebon horn blotting out the sky, reaching hungrily toward Maj. Jim said the movement of Noir had been constant at 110 kilometers a second, but that the speed was building up. He called for a robot check on the tip of Noir and Spor. After careful study, Jim flashed the telescreen for Shadrak. "Noir tip at 60 plus 382," he reported.

Shadrak looked grave. "That gives you no more than four months," he said. "If the movement accelerates, it will be quite earlier. After you land, arrange for periodical checks."

It was time now to begin deceleration. We fixed on the sun of Maj. At first we couldn't feel a change. It was ten hours before the planets slowed down, and we curved to meet the pull of Maj. Two days elapsed by our chronometers before we entered the gravity pull of Spor and began our spiral descent, much as we would had it been the smaller Pelios. Our electroscopes found a city, towers and walls gilded by a rising sun. I worked out the course for Jim and we picked a plain nearby. We settled on a regular nest of repellor beams, to find an army gathered without, an army of men and women and children, not at all frightened and apparently not hostile.