5
The "Starshine" had a mass of about two hundred tons and an intrinsic velocity of so many miles per second. When the field went on, her mass dropped almost to zero, but her kinetic energy remained the same. Her velocity went up almost to infinity. And the Universe went mad.
The vision-ports showed stark lunacy. There were stars, but they were the stars of a madman's dream. They formed and dissolved into nothingness in instants too brief for estimate. For fractions of micro-seconds they careered upon impossible trajectories across the vision-ports' field of view.
Now a monstrous blue-white sun glared in terribly, seemingly almost touching the ship. An instant later there was utter blackness all about. Then colossal flaring globes ringed in theStarshine, and shriveling heat poured in.
Then there was a blue watery-seeming cosmos all around like the vision of an underwater world and dim shapes seemed to swim in it, and then stars again, and then....
It was stark, gibbering madness!
But Kim reached the instrument-board. With the end of the last morsel of power he had ceased to have weight and had floated clear of the floor and everything else.
By the crazy, changing light he sighted himself and, when he touched a sidewall, flung himself toward the now-dark bank of instruments. He caught hold, fumbled desperately and threw the switch a radiation-relay should have thrown. And then the madness ended.
There was stillness. There was nothing anywhere. There was no weight within the ship, nor light, nor any sound save the heavy breathing of Kim and the Mayor of Steadheim. The vision-ports showed nothing.
Looking carefully, with eyes losing the dazzle of now-vanished suns, one could see infinitely faint, infinitely distant luminosities. TheStarshinewas somewhere between galaxies, somewhere in an unspeakable gulf between islands of space, in the dark voids which are the abomination of desolation.
There were small clankings aft. The outer airlock door went shut. A little later the inner door opened. And then Kim swam fiercely through weightlessness and clung to Dona, still in her space-suit, unable to speak for his emotion.
The voice of the Mayor of Steadheim arose in the darkness which was the interior of theStarshine—and the outer cosmos for tens of thousands of light-years all about.
Dona now had the face-plate of her helmet open. She kissed Kim hungrily.
"—brought you something," she said unsteadily. "I'm not sure what, but—something. They've separate engines to power their generators on that ship, and there were tanks I thought were fuel-tanks."
"Space!" roared the Mayor of Steadheim, forward. "Who's that talking? Am I dead? Is this Hades?"
"You're not dead yet," Kim called to him. "I'll tell you in a minute if you will be."
There were no emergency-lights in the ship, but Dona's suit was necessarily so equipped. She turned on lights and Kim looked at the two objects she had brought.
"My dear," he told her, "you did it! A little fuel-tank with gallons in it and a complete catalyzer. By the size of it, one of their beams uses an engine big enough for fifty ships like this!"
Clutching at every projection, he made his way to the engine-room. Dona followed.
"I'm glad, Kim," she said unsteadily, "that I was able to do something important. You always do everything."
"The heck I do," he said. "But anyhow...."
He worked on the tank. She'd sheared it off with a tiny atomic torch and the severed fuel-line had closed of itself, of course. He spliced it into theStarshine'sfuel-line, and waited eagerly for the heavy, viscid fluid to reach the catalyzer and then the engines.
"We'll—be all right now?" asked Dona hopefully.
"We were on transmitter-drive for five minutes, at a guess. You know what that means!"
She caught her breath.
"Kim!We're lost!"
"To say that we're lost is a masterpiece of understatement," he said wryly. "At transmitter-speed we could cross the First Galaxy in a ten-thousandth of a second. Which means roughly a hundred thousand light-years in a ten-thousandth of a second. And we traveled for three hundred seconds or thereabouts. What are our chances of finding our way back?"
"Oh, Kim!" she cried softly. "It's unthinkable!"
He watched the meters. Suddenly, the engines caught. For the fraction of a second they ran irregularly. Then all was normal. There was light. There was weight. An indignant roar came from forward.
"If this is Hades—"
They went to the control-room. The Mayor of Steadheim sat on the floor, staring incredulously about him. As they entered he grinned sheepishly.
"I was floating in the air and couldn't see a thing, and then the lights came on and the floor smacked me! What happened and where are we?"
Kim went to the instrument-board and plugged in the heaters—already the vision-ports had begun to frost—and the air-purifier and the other normal devices of a space-ship.
"What happened is simple enough," said Kim. "The last atom of power on board the ship here threw us into transmitter-field drive. And when that field is established it doesn't take power to maintain it.
"So we started to move! There's a relay that should have stopped us, but there wasn't enough power left to work it. So we traveled for probably five minutes on transmitter-drive."
"We went a long way, eh?" said the mayor, comfortably.
"We did," said Kim grimly. "To Ades from its sun is ninety million miles—eight light-minutes. Minutes, remember! The First Galaxy is a hundred thousand light-years across. Light travels a hundred thousand years, going ninety million miles every eight minutes to cross it.
"TheStarshinetravels a hundred thousand light-years in the ten-thousandth part of a second. In one second—a billion light-years. The most powerful telescope in the Galaxy cannot gather light from so far away. But we went at least three hundred times farther.
"Three hundred billion light-years, plus or minus thirty billions more! We went beyond the farthest that men have ever seen, and kept on beyond the farthest that men have ever thought of!
"The light from the island universes we can see through the ports has never yet reached the First Galaxy since time began. It hasn't had time! We're not only beyond the limits that men have guessed at, we're beyond their wildest imagining!"
The Mayor of Steadheim blinked at him. Then he got up and peered out the vision-ports. Dim, remote luminosities were visible, each one a galaxy of a thousand million suns!
"Hah!" grunted the mayor, "Not much to look at, at that! Now what?"
Kim spread out his hands and looked at Dona.
"Turning about and trying to go back," he said, "would be like starting from an individual grain of sand on a desert, and flying a thousand miles, and then trying to fly back to that grain of sand again. That's how the First Galaxy stacks up."
Dona took a deep breath.
"You'll find a way, Kim! And—anyhow—"
She smiled at him shakily. Whether or not they ever saw another human being she was prepared to take what came, with him. The possibility of being lost amid the uncountable island universes of the cosmos had been known to them both from the beginning of the use of theStarshine.
"We'll take some pictures," Kim told her, "and then sit down on a planet and figure things out."
He set to work making a map of all the island universes in view of theStarshine'scurrent position, with due regard to theStarshine'scourse. On the relatively short jumps within a galaxy, and especially those of a few light-years only, he could simply turn the ship about and come very close to his original position—the line of it, anyhow.
But he did not know within many many billions of light-years how far he had come and he did know that an error of a hundredth of a second of arc would amount to millions of light-years at the distance of the First Galaxy.
The positions of galaxies about the First were plotted only within a radius of something like two million light-years. There had never been a point in even that! At fifteen hundred thousand times that distance he was not likely to strike the tiny mapped area by accident.
He set to work. Presently he was examining the photographs by enlarger for a sign of structure in one of the galaxies in view. One showed evidences of super-giant stars—which proved it the nearest. He aimed theStarshinefor it. He threw the ship into transmitter-drive.
The galaxy was startlingly familiar when they reached it. The stellar types were normal ones and there were star-clusters and doubtless star-drifts too and Kim was wholly accustomed to astro-navigation now.
He simply chose a sol-type sun, set the radiation-switch to stop the little space-ship close by, aimed for it and pressed a button. Instantly they were there. They visited six solar systems.
They found a habitable planet in the last—a bit on the small side, but with good gravity, adequate atmosphere and polar ice-caps to assure its climate.
They landed and its atmosphere was good. The Mayor of Steadheim stepped out and blinked about him.
"Hah!" he said gruffly. "If we've come as far as you say it was hardly worth the trip!"
Kim grinned.
"It looks normal enough," he acknowledged. "But chemistry's the same everywhere and plants will use chlorophyll in sunlight from a sol-type sun. Stalks and leaves will grow anywhere, and the most efficient animals will be warm-blooded. Given similar conditions you'll have parallel evolution everywhere."
"Hm—" said the Mayor of Steadheim. "A planet like this for each of my four sons to settle on, now—when we've settled with those rats from Sinab—"
The planet was a desirable one. TheStarshinehad come to rest where a mountain-range rose out of lush, strange, forest-covered hills, which reached away and away to a greenish sea. There was nothing in view which was altogether familiar and nothing which was altogether strange. The Mayor of Steadheim stamped away to a rocky out-crop where he would have an even better view.
"Poor man!" said Dona softly. "When he finds out that we can never go back, and there'll be only the three of us here while horrible things happen back—back home."
But Kim's expression had suddenly become strained.
"I think," he said softly, "I see a way to get back. I was thinking that a place as far away as this would be ideal for the Empire of Sinab to be moved to. True, they've murdered all the men on nineteen or twenty planets, but we couldn't repair anything by murdering all of them in return.
"If we moved them out here, though, there'd be no other people for them to prey on. They'd regret their lost opportunities for scoundrelism but their real penalty would be that they'd have to learn to be decent in order to survive. It's a very neat answer to the biggest problem of the war with Sinab—a post-war settlement."
"But we haven't any chance of getting back, have we?"
"If we wanted to send them here, how'd we do it?" asked Kim. "By matter-transmitter, of course. A receiver set up here—as there used to be one on Ades—to which a sender would be tuned.
"When a transmitter's tuned to a receiver you can't miss. But our transmitter-drive is just that—a transmitter which sends the ship and itself, with a part which is tuned to receive itself, too.
"I'll set up the receiving element here, for later use. And I'll tune the sender-element to Ades. We'll arrive at the station there and everyone will be surprised."
He paused and spoke reflectively.
"A curious war, this. We've no weapons and we arrive at a post-war settlement before we start fighting. We've decided how to keep from killing our enemies before we're sure how we'll defeat them and I suspect that the men had better stay at home and let the women go out to battle. I'm not sure I like it."
He set to work. In twelve hours one-half of the transmitter-drive of theStarshinehad been removed and set up on the unnamed planet of a galaxy not even imagined by human beings before.
In fifteen hours theStarshine, rather limpingly, went aloft.
An hour later Kim carefully tuned the transmitting part of the little ship's drive to the matter-receiving station on Ades. In that way, and only in that way, the ship would inevitably arrive at the home galaxy of humanity.
And he pushed a button.
It arrived at the matter station on Ades instead of descending from the skies. And the people on Ades were surprised.