Men Against the Stars by Anthology

Author:Anthology [Anthology]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-05-03T04:00:00+00:00

I stood up, conscious that we were no longer falling. I looked at the instrument board. All the lights were dim, untroubled, the needles firmly at zero. I turned and stared at Renfrew, and at Blake, who was ruefully picking himself from the floor.

Renfrew said persuasively: “Let me at the control board, Bill. I want to see our course for Earth.”

For a long minute, I gazed at him; and then, slowly, I stepped aside. I stood by as he set the controls and pulled the accelerator over. Renfrew looked up.

“We’ll reach Earth in about eight hours,” he said, “and it’ll be about a year and a half after we left five hundred years ago.”

Something began to tug at the roof of my cranium. It took several seconds before I realized that it was my brain jumping with the tremendous understanding that suddenly flowed in upon me.

The bachelor sun. I thought dazedly. In easing us out of its field of toleration, it had simply precipitated us into a period of time beyond its field. Renfrew had said . . . had said that it worked in jumps of . . . four hundred ninety-eight years and some seven months and—

But what about the ship? Wouldn’t twenty-seventh century adeledicnander brought to the twenty-second century, before it was invented, change the course of history? I mumbled the question.

Renfrew shook his head. “Do we understand it? Do we even dare monkey with the raw power inside those engines? I’ll say not. As for the ship, we’ll keep it for our own private use.”

“B-but—” I began.

He cut me off. “Look, Bill,” he said, “here’s the situation: that girl who kissed you—don’t think I didn’t see you falling like a ton of bricks—is going to be sitting beside you fifty years from now, when your voice from space reports to Earth that you had wakened on your first lap of the first trip to Centaurus.”

That’s exactly what happened.

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