“You have the secret of material energy?”
“Not that,” the scientist growled, “but I have something else as valuable. I have the secret of Manning’s drive: I know what it is that enables him to exceed the speed of light ... to go ten thousand times as fast as light ... the Lord knows how much faster if he wanted to.”
“No ordinary drive would do that,” said Chambers. “It would take more than power to make a ship go that fast.”
“You bet your life it would, and Manning is the boy who’s got it. He uses a space field. I think I can duplicate it.”
“And how long will it take you to do this work?”
“About a week,” Craven told him. “Perhaps a little longer, perhaps a little less. But once we go, we’ll go as fast as Manning does. We’ll be short on power, but I think I can do something about that, too.”
Chambers took a chair beside the desk. “But do we know the way home?”
“We can find it,” said Craven.
“But there are no familiar constellations,” objected Chambers. “He dragged us out so far that there isn’t a single star that any one of us can identify.”
“I said I’d find the Solar System,” Craven declared impatiently, “and I will. Manning started out for it, didn’t he? I saw the way he went. The Sun is a type G star and all I’ll do is look for a type G star.”
“But there may be more than one type G star,” objected the financier.
“Probably are,” Craven agreed, “but there are other ways of finding the Sun and identifying it.”
He volunteered no further information, went back to work with the pad and pencil. Chambers rose wearily from his chair.
“Tell me when you know what we can do,” he said.
“Sure,” Craven grunted.
*
“That’s the Sun,” said Craven. “That faint star between those two brighter ones.”
“Are you sure of it?” demanded Stutsman.
“Of course. I don’t make blunders.”
“It’s the only type G star in that direction,” suggested Chambers, helpfully.
“Not that, either,” declared Craven. “In fact, there are several type G stars. I examined them all and I know I’m right.”
“How do you know?” challenged Stutsman.
“Spectroscopic examination. That collector field of ours gathers energy just like a burning glass. You’ve seen a burning glass, haven’t you?”
He stared at Stutsman, directing the question at him.
Stutsman shuffled awkwardly, unhappily.
“Well,” Craven went on, “I used that for a telescope. Gathered the light from the suns and analyzed it. Of course it didn’t act like a real telescope, produce an image or anything like that, but it was ideal for spectroscopic work.”
They waited for him to explain. Finally, he continued:
“All of the stars I examined were just type G stars, nothing else, but there was a difference in one of them. First, the spectroscope showed lines of reflected light passing through oxygen and hydrogen, water vapor and carbon dioxide. Pure planetary phenomena, never found on a star itself. Also it showed that a certain per cent of the light was polarized. Now remember that I examined it for a long time and I found out something else from the length of observation which convinces me. The light varied with a periodic irregularity. The chronometers aren’t working exactly right out here, so I can’t give you any explanation in terms of hours. But I find a number of regularly recurring changes in light intensity and character ... and that proves the presence of a number of planetary bodies circling the star. That’s the only way one could explain the fluctuations for the G-type star is a steady type. It doesn’t vary greatly and has no light fluctuations to speak of. Not like the Cepheid and Mira types.”
“And that proves it’s our Sun?” asked Chambers.
Craven nodded. “Fairly definitely, I’d say.”
“How far away is it?” Stutsman wanted to know.
*
Craven snorted. “You would ask something like that.”
“But,” declared Stutsman, “there are ways of measuring how far a star is away from any point, measuring both the distance and the size of the star.”
“Okay,” agreed Craven, “you find me something solid and within reach that’s measurable. Something, preferably, about 200 million miles or so across. Then I’ll tell you how far we are from the Sun. This ship is not in an orbit. It’s not fixed in space. I have no accurate way of measuring distances and angles simultaneously and accurately. Especially angles as small as these would be.”
Craven and Stutsman glared at one another.
“It’s a long way however you look at it,” the financier said. “If we’re going to get there, we’ll have to start as soon as possible. How soon can we start, Doctor?”
“Very soon. I have the gravity concentration field developed and Manning left me just enough power to get a good start.” He chuckled, took off his glasses, wiped the lenses and put them back on again. “Imagine him giving me that power!”
“But after we use up that power, what are we going to do?” demanded Chambers. “This collector lens of yours won’t furnish us enough to keep going.”
“You’re right,” Craven conceded, “but we’ll be able to get more. We’ll build up what speed we can and then we’ll shut off the drive and let momentum carry us along. In the meantime our collector will gather power for us. We’re advancing toward the source of radiation now, instead of away from it. Out here, where there’s little gravity stress, fewer conflicting lines of gravitation, we’ll be able to spread out the field, widen it, make it thousands of miles across. And the new photo-cells will be a help as well.”
“How are the photo-cells coming?” asked Chambers.
Craven grinned. “We’ll have a bank of them in within a few hours, and replace the others as fast as we can. I have practically the whole crew at work on them. Manning doesn’t know it, but he found the limit of those photo-cells when he was heaving energy at us back in the Solar System. He blistered them. I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but it was. You have to hand it to Manning and Page. They are a couple of smart men.”
To the eye there was only one slight difference between the old cells and the new ones. The new type cell, when on no load, appeared milky white, whereas the old cells on no load were silvery. The granular surface of the new units was responsible for the difference in appearance, for each minute section of the surface was covered with even more minute metallic hexagonal pyramids and prisms.
“Just a little matter of variation in the alloy,” Craven explained. “Crystalization of the alloy, forming those little prisms and pyramids. As a result, you get a surface thousands of times greater than in the old type. Helps you absorb every bit of the energy.”
*
The Interplanetarian arrowed swiftly starward, driving ahead with terrific momentum while the collector lens, sweeping up the oncoming radiations, charged the great banks of accumulators. The G-type star toward which they were heading was still pale, but the two brighter stars to either side blazed like fiery jewels against the black of space.
“You say we’ll be only a week or so behind Manning?” asked Chambers.
Craven looked at the financier, his eyes narrowed behind the heavy lenses. He sucked in his loose