“Tony, look! The bolide chart!”
Startled at his wife’s sharp interruption, York turned to look.
The bolide chart was a luminous screen whose milky surface showed any and all material bodies within range. Nothing larger than a grain of sand could escape the supersensitive instrument which recorded every tiniest ripple in the ubiquitous ether. With its train of mechanisms, the chart instantly recorded distance, speed, direction, size, shape, colour and electrical charge of any passing object within the relatively close radius of a billion miles.
It was one of the precautions York had taken, with his scientific genius, to avoid accidents in treacherous space, so that their immortality was further safeguarded.
He watched the little black dot streaking across the lighted screen. At their tremendous speed, the passing object would be gone in seconds.
“No danger of collision with it,” he said, integrating the data in his head. “It has a speed, relative to space, of a hundred thousand miles a second. Size, twice as large as our ship. Shape, quite uniform, elongated. Colour, silvery. Direction, toward Alpha Centauri, from about Sol’s position. Electrical charge—”
The dot slipped off the edge of the screen, beyond range. “It’s gone,” said Vera. “First bit of matter we’ve passed in empty space, in days. Data sounded like a space ship, but of course it was only a lonely, wandering meteor of space. Maybe the next record will be that of the planet Pluto, within the Solar System. We’re close now!”
York was strangely reflective.
“Yes, we’re close—within a few trillions of miles. And therefore, it could be… Vera, I think it was a space ship! I barely caught its electrical charge record; and it seemed to be inordinately high—like that of a power-plant of some sort. Meteors don’t have power-plants. If it was a space ship, does it mean that Earthmen have already achieved interstellar engines! And were they heading for Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to Sol? And what for?”
“We’ll find out when we arrive at Earth,” began Vera, but her immortal husband interrupted.
“We’ll find out now!”
York snapped on his radio, twirling the dials of his transmitter. Underneath the cabin floor a great generator hummed to life. A million kilowatts of electrical power, drawn from the eternal shower of cosmic rays, surged through the radio’s diamond-walled tubes.
The stentorian radio voice that burst from the antennae of his ship was borne by sufficient energy to be heard with the weakest of receptors within a light year. On Earth, that amount of power would have heated all metals within a mile ten degrees above their surroundings.
“Anton York calling the space ship heading for Alpha Centauri!”
After he had called over and over, without an answer, he frowned in perplexity and reached for the engine controls.
“I’ve got to find out about that ship,” he muttered. “The fact that it doesn’t answer is—ominous!”
With his inertia-suspension field on full power, York slowed his ship from its translight speed to zero in short hours, and shot back along the course of the mysterious ship. It was odd to find a ship out here in the depths between stars. He overhauled it in another few hours. They stared as it bulked huge against the backdrop of flaming stars.
It was unlighted, dark, but York’s detectors showed that its power-plant was warping space and accelerating constantly. He tried his radio again, with no result. Then he sent a rocket signal over its bow, and when that failed, gave a baffled grunt.
“One of two things,” he conjectured. “Its occupants are up to no good, or it’s a derelict. We’ll find out quick enough.” “Careful, Tony,” warned his wife.
In a space suit, presently, York cautiously maneuvered himself toward the strange ship with his reaction pistols. Vera was covering him with their guns. But no sign of hostility came from the accelerating ship; no sign of life at all.
Finding a hatch with the usual outside emergency lever, York entered the ship. A hand flash lighted the way as he went down a darkened companionway into the main cabin. He gasped as his cone of light revealed the figures of two men lying unconscious against the back wall, as though they had been thrown there violently.
Unconscious? York had only to notice their utter stillness to realize they were dead!
Back in the other ship, Vera listened as York’s voice came from his helmet radio, a half hour later.
“Listen, Vera! This is a first-class mystery. The crew of two are dead, from excess acceleration. The air is thin, barely breathable, very impure. Their food supplies are mouldy. Water, evaporated. It’s almost as though they had been holding out against terrific odds. Must have left Earth months and months ago, at their slow speed, less than light. Died trying to reach an impossible goal, light years away. Fools, they had no chance at all! Only a translight speed engine would do it. What drove them to this suicidal attempt at interstellar travel?”
His voice was half angered, half sorrowful.
“Daredevils there have always been,” returned Vera. “Some, in Earth’s history succeeded—Columbus, Byrd, Lindbergh.”
“Daredevils? Perhaps.” York was preoccupied. “Strange, though that these men planned so poorly. And the haggard expressions on their faces, frozen in death, are those of men driven by some tremendous fanaticism. I wish I knew—”
Vera heard the soft indrawing of his breath, as he seemed to stoop, and then his voice again, excited.
“Vera, go into the lab and prepare the following injections, as I give instructions. Adrenalin—”
He went on, rapidly naming several rare compounds among his supplies, and giving the percentage of their solution.
“I’m coming across with one body,” he said then. “Also have a bottle of oxygen ready. Hurry!”
“Tony, you mean—”
“Yes, reviving a dead man! One has been dead only an hour. He’s still warm. Rigor mortis hasn’t set in. But we’ll have to hurry!”
2
TWENTY minutes later, Vera was handing York a hypodermic as they bent over the body of a man dead for more than an hour. Earthly science would have given the case up as hopeless. But York, with a knowledge of life forces garnished in several lifetimes of research, battled to bring back the spark of sentience. After a series of injections into the spine and heart, he waited. Powerful compounds were at work.
A fine dew of sweat beaded York’s forehead. It was a slim chance, at the most.
Vera caught her breath suddenly.
A quiver ran over the corpse. A cheek muscle twitched. A low, hesitant thumping came into being in the quiet of the cabin. A beating heart! The ribs flexed suddenly, and the lungs gasped for breath.
York clapped a breathing cone over the man’s nose and sent a stream of hissing oxygen into his lungs. The body quivered all over now, and suddenly the eyes flicked open, staring around blankly.
York took away the breathing cone, looking at the resurrected man a little proudly. He had run far into Death’s territory and retrieved one of its victims!
“Can you speak?” York queried.
The vacant eyes paused on his for a moment, but only a broken gabble came from his lips.
Vera shuddered at the weird gibbering.
“Tony, you’ve brought back his body, but not his mind! It’s horrible!”
York shuddered himself.
“But I’ve got to find out about the ship and journey,” he insisted. “I’ll try telepathy.”
His brow furrowed as he concentrated on projecting a telepathic message. Within his left ear reposed a tiny instrument that could amplify brain waves enormously, his own or those of others. Sometimes he and Vera, for long periods of time, had communicated solely by telepathy, though it was mentally tiring.