John W. Campbell Jr.- Infinite Trilogy by John W. Campbell

Author:John W. Campbell [Campbell, John W.]
Format: epub
Published: 2010-01-16T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XI

Morey thought he was the first to waken when, seven hours later, he dressed and dove lightly, noiselessly, out into the library. Suddenly, he noticed that the telectroscope was in operation-he heard the low hum of its smoothly working director motors.

He turned and headed back toward the observatory. Arcot was busy with the telectroscope.

“What’s up, Arcot?” he demanded.

Arcot looked up at him and dusted off his hands. “I’ve just been gimmicking up the telectroscope. We’re going a-round this dead dwarf once every three milliseconds, which makes it awfully hard to see the stars around us. So I put in a cutoff which will shut the telectroscope off most of the’ time; it only looks at the sky once every three milliseconds. As a result, we can get a picture of what’s going on around us very easily. It won’t be a steady picture, but since we’re getting a still picture three hundred times a second, it will be better than any moving picture film ever projected as far as accuracy is concerned.

“I did it because I want to take a look at that bright streak in the sky. I think it’ll be the means to our salvation—if there is any."

Morey nodded. “I see what you mean; if that’s another white dwarf-which it most likely is-we can use it to escape. I think I see what you’re driving at."

“If it doesn’t work,” Arcot said coolly, “we can profit by the example of the people we left back there. Suicide is preferable to dying of cold."

Morey nodded. “The question is: How helpless are we?"

“Depends entirely ton that star; let’s see if we can get a focus on it.” ||

At the orbital velocity of the ship, focussing on the star was indeed a difficult thing to do. It took them well over an hour to get the image centered in the screen without its drifting off toward one edge; it took even longer to get the focus close enough to a sphere to give them a definite reading on the instruments. The image had started out as a streak, hut by taking smaller and smaller sections of the streak at the proper times, they managed to get a good, solid image. But to get it bright enough was another problem; they were only picking up a fraction of the light, and it had to be amplified greatly to make a visible image.

When they finally got what they were looking for, Morey gazed steadily at the image. “Now the job is to figure the distance. And we haven’t got much parallax to work with."

“If we compute in the timing in our blinker system at opposite sides of the orbit, I think we can do it,” Arcot said.

They went to work on the problem. When Fuller and Wade showed up, they were given work to do-Morey gave them equations to solve without telling them to what the figures applied.

Finally Arcot said: “Their period about the common center of gravity is thirty-nine hours, as I figure it.

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