The Star Dwellers by James Blish

Author:James Blish [Blish, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Avon
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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Chapter Eight:

A Temple of Stars

It was a frustrating and alarming sensation to feel one’s self being hurtled faster and faster into the unknown aboard a ship not even remotely under human control. Jack found time to wonder if Sylvia had felt anything like, this, during her ride to Aaa aboard Trans-Stellar’s proxy. Probably not, he decided (completely wrongly); Sylvia had too much brass to let anything like this scare her.

But it sure scared him.

The space outside the Ariadne became murkier and harder to see through with every minute. After a few hours there was nothing visible in the screens but a backdrop of soot, through which a very few nearby stars burned redly as they passed. This didn’t seem to bother Hesperus in the least; he kept piling on the acceleration—and doing it in normal space, for either he hadn’t yet discovered the Standing Wave drive or he didn’t understand its function. Even at seven-tenths of the speed of light he was still relying on his fishlike style of ducking, dodging, twitching and reversing his field to avoid major chunks of matter. The minor ones he simply rammed into, if he “saw” them at all. Luckily, at this velocity the Ariadne s mass had gone up so enormously that such bubbles exploded into vapor before they could do much worse to her than etch her skin a little.

But it was very hard on Hesperus’ passenger. He considered letting Hesperus in on the secret of the Standing Wave. Not only would it save Jack the severe battering he was getting, but it would also save time—and there were only three weeks left, after all, to find Langer and Sandbag, if they could be found at all. Even considering how closely spaced were the stars inside the cloud, three weeks at sub-light velocities would get the Ariadne essentially nowhere…

…Except that she had already passed three or four stars in the first day of flight!

Evidently he didn’t need to worry about betraying the Haertal equations to the Angels. Whatever they had, it was better.

“Hesperus?”

“Receiving.”

“How are you managing to chew up so much distance at less than the speed of light?”

“I will have to ask my brother on Earth for the words…Yes. We are cruising a vector in normal space between the two time axes, t-time and tau-time. The distances covered are more or less real, but the times involved cancel out except for a loss due to…?…Yes, Planck’s Constant. The principle is much like the one that is used by this artifact in your egg, the…?…The Haertel overdrive. But much simpler.”

“Oh. But does it have to be so rough?”

“Rough? Oh, erratic. Yes, we are still in normal space, not isolated as your artifact would isolate us. I will attempt to smooth the turns somewhat.”

Hesperus’ idea of smoothing things out benefited Jack very little. He was finally driven to suiting up and immersing himself in the thick oil of the Ariadne’s small anti-acceleration tank, from which he watched the scene outside the ship as best he could through the spacesuit’s circumscribed orthicon goggles.

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