The ship plunged on down, still gaining speed as it fell toward the Sun. The few who felt able continued slowly to assist the enormous majority who were ill.
Libby continued to sleep, the luxurious return-to-the-womb sleep of those who have learned to enjoy free fall. He had had almost no sleep since the day the Families had been arrested; his overly active mind had spent all its time worrying the problem of a new space drive.
The big ship precessed around him; he stirred gently and did not awake. It steadied in a new attitude and the acceleration warning brought him instantly awake. He oriented himself, placed himself flat against the after bulkhead, and waited; weight hit him almost at once-three gees this time and he knew that something was badly wrong. He had gone almost a quarter mile aft before he found a hide-away; nevertheless he struggled to his feet and started the unlikely task of trying to climb that quarter mile-now straight up-at three times his proper weight, while blaming himself for having let Lazarus talk him into leaving the control room.
He managed only a portion of the trip … but an heroic portion, one about equal to climbing the stairs of a ten-story building while carrying a man on each shoulder … when resumption of free fall relieved him. He zipped the rest of the way like a salmon returning home and was in the control room quickly. “What happened?”
Lazarus said regretfully, “Had to vector, Andy.” Slayton Ford said nothing but looked worried.
“Yes, I know. But why?’ Libby was already strapping himself against the copilot’s couch while studying the astrogational situation.
“Red lights on the screen.” Lazarus described the display, giving coordinates and relative vectors.
Libby nodded thoughtfully. “Naval craft. No commercial vessels would be in such trajectories. A minelaying bracket.”
“That’s what I figured. I didn’t have time to consult you; I had to use enough mile-seconds to be sure they wouldn’t have boost enough to reposition on us.”
“Yes, you had to.” Libby looked worried. “I thought we were free of any possible Naval interference.”
“They’re not ours,” put in Slayton Ford. “They can’t be ours no matter what orders have been given since I-uh, since I left. They must be Venerian craft.”
“Yeah,” agreed Lazarus, “they must be. Your pal, the new Administrator, hollered to Venus for help and they gave it to him-just a friendly gesture of interplanetary good will.”
Libby was hardly listening. He was examining data and processing it through the calculator inside his skull. “Lazarus… this new orbit isn’t too good.”
“I know,” Lazarus agreed sadly. “I had to duck … so I ducked the only direction they left open to me-closer to the Sun.”
“Too close, perhaps.”
The Sun is not a large star, nor is it very hot. But it is hot with reference to men, hot enough to strike them down dead if they are careless about tropic noonday ninety-two million miles away from it, hot enough that we who are reared under its rays nevertheless dare not look directly at it.
At a distance of two and a half million miles the Sun beats out with a flare fourteen hundred times as bright as the worst ever endured in Death Valley, the Sahara, or Aden. Such radiance would not be perceived as heat or light; it would be death more sudden than the full power of a blaster. The Sun is a hydrogen bomb, a naturally occurring one; the New Frontiers was skirting the limits of its circle of total destruction.
It was hot inside the ship. The Families were protected against instant radiant death by the armored walls but the air temperature continued to mount. They were relieved of the misery of free fall but they were doubly uncomfortable, both from heat and from the fact that the bulkheads slanted crazily; there was no level place to stand or lie, The ship was both spinning on its axis and accelerating now; it was never intended to do both at once and the addition of the two accelerations, angular and linear, met “down” the direction where outer and after bulkheads met. The ship was being spun through necessity to permit some of the impinging radiant energy to re-radiate on the “cold” side. The forward acceleration was equally from necessity, a forlorn-hope maneuver to pass the Sun as far out as possible and as fast as possible, in order to spend least time at perihelion, the point of closest approach.
It was hot in the control room. Even Lazarus had voluntarily shed his kilt and shucked down to Venus styles. Metal was hot to the touch. On the great stellarium screen an enormous circle of blackness marked where the Sun’s disc should have been; the receptors had cut out automatically at such a ridicubus demand.
Lazarus repeated Libby’s last words. “‘Thirty-seven minutes to perihelion.’ We can’t take it, Andy. The ship can’t take it.”
“I know. I never intended us top this close.”
“Of course you didn’t. Maybe I shouldn’t have maneuvered. Maybe we would have missed the mines anyway. Oh, well-” Lazarus squared his shoulders and filed it with the might-have-beens. “It looks to me, son, about time to try out your gadget.” He poked a thumb at Libby’s uncouth-looking “space drive.” “You say that all you have to do is to hook up that one connection?”
“That is what is intended. Attach that one lead to any portion of the mass to be affected. Of course I don’t really know that it will work,” Libby admitted. “There is no way to test it.”
“Suppose it doesn’t?’
“There are three possibilities.” Libby answered methodically. “In the first place, nothing may happen.”
“In which case we fry.”
“In the second place, we and the ship may cease to exist as mattei as we know it.”
“Dead, you mean. But probably a pleasanter way.”
“I suppose so. I don’t know what death is. In the third place, if my hypotheses are correct, we will recede from the Sun at a speed just under that of light.”
Lazarus eyed the gadget and wiped sweat from his shoulders. “It’s getting hotter, Andy. Hook it up-and it has better be good!”
Andy hooked it up.
“Go ahead,” urged Lazarus. “Push the button, throw the switch, cut the beam. Make it march.”
“I have,” Libby insisted. “Look at the Sun.”
“Huh? Oh!”
The great circle of blackness which had marked the position of the Sun on the star-speckled stellarium was shrinking rapidly. In a dozen heartbeats it lost half its diameter; twenty seconds later it had dwindled to a quarter of its original width.
“It worked,” Lazarus said softly. “Look at it, Slayton! Sign me up as a purple baboon-it worked!”
“I rather thought it would,” Libby answered seriously. “It should, you know.”
“Hmm-That may be evident to you, Andy. It’s not to me. How fast are we going?”
“Relative to what?”
“Uh, relative to the Sun.”
“I haven’t had opportunity to measure it, but it seems to be just under the speed of light. It can’t be greater.”
“Why not? Aside from theoretical considerations.”
“We still see.” Libby pointed at the stellarium bowl.
“Yeah, so we do,” Lazarus mused. “Hey! We shouldn’t be able to. I ought to doppler out.”
Libby looked blank, then smiled. “But it dopplers right back in. Over on that side, toward the Sun, we’re seeing by short radiations stretched to visibility. On the opposite side we’re picking up something around radio wavelengths dopplered down to light.”
“And in between?”
“Quit pulling my leg, Lazarus. I’m sure you can work out relatively vector additions quite as well as I can.”
“You work it out,” Lazarus said firmly. “I’m just going to sit here and admire it. Eh, Slayton?”