York left the rest ominously unsaid.
2
BUT this did not happen. In the following year, York spent mind-numbing hours in his laboratory. Vera took down an endless series of notes. Together they sought to readjust their science to the new conditions.
In one thing, nature’s laws of compensation were automatic. Their eyes and ears learned gradually to work under new conditions. The irksome doubling effects disappeared. But all else was still a mystery.
York became irritable.
“I’m getting nowhere,” he raged. “I feel as, helpless as a baby. la our Universe I had a wealth of super-science, by Earthly standards, at my fingertips. Now I can’t even make a single reaction motor. Rockets here don’t obey Newton’s Third Law! It’s getting me down. I’m like a Stone Age man looking around and wondering what it’s all and, Vera, I don’t like it.”
He went on, betraying a nervousness he had kept under control rigidly.
“The Three Eternals had no chance to fight back when they were destroyed. Neither would we, if—that patrol ship found us. But that isn’t all.”
Both knew without saying that there were other dangers. Already their stored air and food supplies were running low. In their own Universe, York would have laughed and transmuted oxygen and protein from sheer metal, bending the atoms to his will. But here, in a maddening universe with new set of laws and measurements, he had less command over circumstances than a Neanderthal Man in some 20th century city.
“That Sun, Tony,” Vera whispered. “It’s far past first magnitude now. We’re drifting straight toward it. Another year—”
She left the appalling thought unfinished. In another year, unless they achieved a workable motor, they would fall into the huge, blazing sun. For a year it had grown steadily brighter athwart their drifting course. But they might starve first, or be caught by the patrol ship.
They had three ways to die, in this strange, mad universe, none of them pleasant.
The alien sun grew until it was the size of Sol from the distance of Pluto. They began to feel the slight acceleration, as its tentacles of gravity clutched at their ship. It was a strange, huge star, red as Antares.
Periodically, every twenty-two days, it increased in brightness. At its maximum it was almost blue-hot. Then it declined to the red state again. On and on the cycle went, with the precise regularity of a delicately made clock.
“A Cepheid variable,” York said “Like the Cepheids of our universe, it obeys some mysterious law of waxing and waning atomic-disintegration in its interior. And similarly, if the balance slips at some time, it will explode into a flaming nova. These are very unstable stars. If there are planets—”
He searched with his telescope. It was small, but through a principle of television magnification, had a resolving power ten times greater than a 100 inch reflector. He swept all the regions around the pulsing sun.
“Yes, it has planets, thirteen of them,” he announced finally. “We’re drifting toward the tenth outermost. We won’t fall into the sun after all, Vera. We’ll crash on that planet!”
He was grimly humorous.
“Radio.” Vera clutched at straws. “An SOS signal might bring rescue.”
“Or that patrol ship.” York shook his head. “But I don’t think their race is here at all. This Cepheid sun sheds an extremely variable radiation. Any planet here must have a range of temperature that shoots Sun frigidity to super-tropical heat every twenty-two days. Evolution must have balked at trying to adjust creatures to such rapid changes.” He laughed gratingly. “And in the first place, I can’t signal an SOS. There’s a new radio principle here, too.”
He faced around haggardly.
“Only one chance, Vera. If I can get one little rocket working, we can land safely on that planet.”
While the world enlarged to a dull slate orb in the next month, York laboured without sleep. He took drugs that would have killed a normal man, and phosphate foods that went directly to his brain without feeding his body. He trusted his tremendous vitality and the cosmic-fed radiogens to keep him alive.
A week before the deadline, a tiny clue came to him—for the first time. the basic laws of the new universe dimly formed in his striving brain. Earth scientists, thousands upon thousands of them, had taken several centuries to piece out the natural laws of Earth’s Universe. Alone, in two years, York began to note down the first fundamental rules in a totally new and strange universe where even light-waves slowed down.
“Newton’s Third Law, the one applied to rockets, has a clause here! The higher the energy, the slower the reaction. It’s almost backward. That means a slow-burning fuel will do the trick where an explosive one won’t. Now I’m getting somewhere.”
“Hurry, Tony!”
The planet loomed now like a giant blue moon.
Hastily York constructed a wide rocket tube at the stern. Loaded with slow-burning phosphorus, it belched forth—clouds of smoky vapour. It would be useless as a rocket in Earth’s Universe. But here it propelled the ship forward with amazing power.
York skilfully maneuvered the ship into a spiral course around the planet barely in time to stop a stone like plunge. It lowered screamingly into the atmosphere. The globular craft landed, just before consuming the last of their phosphorus supplies. York and Vera were thrown violently against the wall.
Vera crawled to her husband, weeping in mixed joy and fright.
“Tony, we’re safe! The ship held. Tony!”
Groggily he opened his eyes, stilling her alarm that he might have been killed.
“Yes, made it,” he mumbled. “New universe can’t beat us. Now let me sleep awhile—”
He slept for three days. When he awoke, he devoured the enormous quantity of hot foods Vera had held ready. York relaxed with a sigh. Then he reverted to normal after an ordeal that might have shattered the mind and health of an Earthly mortal. He relaxed only for a moment. Then he was at his instruments, testing outside conditions.
“Air unbreathable, mainly hydrocarbons. Temperature minus one hundred twenty, but rising. The Cepheid sun is building up to its maximum.”
They looked out over the alien world. It was fiat, barren, blanketed with white, frozen gases. BM these were dissipating slowly, swirling up into the atmosphere.
In a week’s time all the white gas-snow was gone. The previously barren loam stirred with life. Weird, saw-edged plant life burst forth and grew amazingly, at a visible rate. As the Cepheid luminary rose to its maximum, it poured down a flood of hot blue rays. Almost abruptly the environment became tropical. Pseudo-palms and ferns reached for the sky.
“Life, after all,” marvelled York. “But probably only plant forms, enjoying a brief ‘summer’ of less than two weeks before the Cepheid’s decline to ‘winter’ radiation.”
He made a sudden exclamation.
“No. I’m wrong again. See those scuttling little forms among the grasses, like rabbits and weasels? Animal life! Nature is more persistent than I thought. Well anyway, I’m almost sure rational beings could not have arisen.”
“I think you’re wrong again, Tony.” Vera smiled. “Look there, just over the horizon. I saw it before you awoke. In the telescope it looks like the top of a transparent dome. It may be a city.” She gasped suddenly, in remembrance. “Tony, suppose it’s the city of the patrol ship!”
York started, but spoke calmly.