“Oh, bugs! You’re carrying caution to extremes, Mart. What can happen?
Even if gravitation should be nullified, I would rise only slowly,
heading south the angle of our latitude—that’s thirty-nine
degrees—away from the perpendicular. I couldn’t shoot off on a tangent,
as some of these hop-heads have been claiming. Inertia would make me
keep pace, approximately, with the earth in its rotation. I would rise
slowly—only as fast as the tangent departs from the curvature of the
earth’s surface. I haven’t figured out how fast that is, but it must be
pretty slow.”
“Pretty slow?” Crane smiled. “Figure it out.”
“All right—but I’ll bet it’s slower than the rise of a toy balloon.”
Seaton threw down the papers and picked up his slide rule, a twenty-inch
deci-trig duplex. “You’ll concede that it is allowable to neglect the
radial component of the orbital velocity of the earth, for a first
approximation, won’t you—or shall I figure that in too?”
“You may neglect that factor.”
“All right—let’s see. Radius of rotation here in Washington would be
cosine latitude times equatorial radius, approximately—call it
thirty-two hundred miles. Angular velocity, fifteen degrees an hour. I
want secant fifteen less one times thirty-two hundred. Right? Secant
equals one over cosine—um-m-m-m—one point oh three five. Then point oh
three five times thirty-two hundred. Hundred and twelve miles first
hour. Velocity constant with respect to sun, accelerated respecting
point of departure. Ouch! You win, Mart—I’d step out! Well, how about
this, then? I’ll put on a suit and carry rations. Harness outside, with
the same equipment I used in the test flights before we built _Skylark
One_—plus the new stuff. Then throw on the zone, and see what happens.
There can’t be any jar in taking off, and with that outfit I can get
back O.K. if I go clear to Jupiter!”
Crane sat in silence, his keen mind considering every aspect of the
motions possible, of velocity, of acceleration, of inertia. He already
knew well Seaton’s resourcefulness in crises and his physical and mental
strength.
“As far as I can see, that might be safe,” he admitted finally, “and we
really should know something about it besides the theory.”
“Fine! I’ll get at it—be ready in five minutes. Yell at the girls, will
you? They’d break us off at the ankles if we pull anything new without
letting them in on it.”
A few minutes later the “girls” strolled out into Crane Field, arms
around each other—Dorothy Seaton, her gorgeous auburn hair framing
violet eyes and vivid coloring; black-haired, dark-eyed Margaret Crane.
“Br-r-r, it’s cold!” Dorothy shivered, wrapping her coat more closely
about her. “This must be the coldest day Washington has seen for years!”
“It is cold,” Margaret agreed. “I wonder what they are going to do out
here, this kind of weather?”
As she spoke, the two men stepped out of the “testing shed”—the huge
structure that housed their Osnomian-built space-cruiser, _Skylark II_.
Seaton waddled clumsily, wearing as he did a Crane space suit which,
built of fur, canvas, metal, and transparent silica, braced by steel
netting and equipped with air-tanks and heaters, rendered its wearer
independent of outside conditions of temperature and pressure. Outside
this suit he wore a heavy harness of leather, buckled about his body,
shoulders, and legs, attached to which were numerous knobs, switches,
dials, bakelite cases, and other pieces of apparatus. Carried by a
strong aluminum framework which was in turn supported by the harness,
the universal bearing of a small power-bar rose directly above his
grotesque-looking helmet.
“What do you think you’re going to do in that thing, Dickie?” Dorothy
called. Then, thinking that he could not hear her voice, she turned to
Crane. “What are you letting that precious husband of mine do now,
Martin? He looks like he’s up to something.”
While she was speaking, Seaton had snapped the release of his
face-plate.
“Nothing much, Dottie. Just going to show you-all the zone of force.
Martin wouldn’t let me turn it on unless I got all cocked and primed for
a year’s journey into space.”
“Dot, what is that zone of force, anyway?” asked Margaret.
“Oh, it’s something Dick got into his head during that awful fight they
had on Osnome. He hasn’t thought of anything else since we got back. You
know how the attractors and repellors work? Well, he found out something
funny about the way everything acted while the Mardonalians were
bombarding them with a certain kind of a wave-length. He finally figured
out the exact vibration that did it, and found out that if it is made
strong enough, it acts as if a repellor and attractor were working
together—only so much stronger that nothing can get through the
boundary, either way—in fact, it’s so strong that it cuts anything in
two that’s in the way. And the funny thing is that there’s nothing there
at all, really; but Dick says that the forces meeting there, or
something, make it act as though something really important were there.
See?”
“Uh-huh,” assented Margaret, doubtfully, just as Crane finished the
final adjustments and moved toward them. A safe distance away from
Seaton, he turned and waved his hand.
Instantly Seaton disappeared from view, and around the place where he
had stood there appeared a shimmering globe some twenty feet in
diameter—a globe apparently a perfect spherical mirror, which darted
upward and toward the south. After a moment the globe disappeared and
Seaton was again seen. He was now standing upon a hemispherical mass of
earth. He darted back toward the group upon the ground, while the mass
of earth fell with a crash a quarter of a mile away. High above their
heads the mirror again encompassed Seaton, and again shot upward and
southward. Five times this maneuver was repeated before Seaton came
down, landing easily in front of them and opening his helmet.
“It’s just what we thought it was, only worse,” he reported tersely.
“Can’t do a thing with it. Gravitation won’t work through it—bars
won’t—nothing will. And dark? DARK! Folks, you never saw real darkness,
nor heard real silence. It scared me stiff!”
“Poor little boy—afraid of the dark!” exclaimed Dorothy. “We saw
absolute blackness in space.”
“Not like this, you didn’t. I just saw absolute darkness and heard
absolute silence for the first time in my life. I never imagined
anything like it—come on up with me and I’ll show it to you.”
“No you won’t!” his wife shrieked as she retreated toward Crane. “Some
other time, perhaps.”
Seaton removed the harness and glanced at the spot from which he had
taken off, where now appeared a hemispherical hole in the ground.
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