The Weapon Makers by A. E. Van Vogt

Author:A. E. Van Vogt [Vogt, A. E. van]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science
ISBN: 9780441131532
Google: 7m1toAEACAAJ
Amazon: B00H8CKJKO
Publisher: Unknown
Published: 1947-01-01T16:00:00+00:00

Ten

IT WASN’T THAT THE DARKNESS LIGHTENED. HEDROCK SAGGED for a long time with his eyes open.

Slowly, he grew aware ofa quietness around him, a lack of pressure, of movement. The elements of his mind gathered a little closer together. He straightened in the control chair and glanced at the ’stat plates.

He was staring into space. In every direction were stars. No sun, nothing but needlesharp points of light varying in brilliance. And no pressure of acceleration, no gravity. It wasn’t an unusual experience; but this time it was different. He glanced at the Infinity Drive, and it was still in gear. That was the trouble. It was in gear. The speedometer showed impossible figures; the automatic calendar said that the time was 7 P.M., August 28, 4791 Isher.

Hedrock nodded to himself. So he had been unconscious for twenty-two days; and during that time the ship had gone—he glanced at the speedometer, it was registering something over four hundred million miles a second. At that rate, he was covering the distance between Earth and Centaurus every eighteen hours. The problem was to retrace his course.

Thoughtfully, he eased the clutch of the automatic half-circle into the steering shaft. It whirred and then went ticaticatac a hundred and eighty times, very fast. The stars reeled, but settled into steadiness as the stop watch showed three seconds. A perfect hairpin turn in twelve hundred million miles. At that rate he would be within sight of Earth’s sun in another twenty-two days. No, wait! It wasn’t as simple as that.

He couldn’t subject himself again to the kind of pressure that had held him unconscious so long. After some estimations, he set the drive lever at three quarters reverse. And waited. The question was,how soon had he recovered consciousness after the pressure stopped? Two hours passed, and still nothing had happened. His head kept drooping, his eyes closing. But the blow of deceleration didn’t come.

Uneasily expectant, Hedrock finally went to sleep on one of the couches.

There was a jar that shook his bones. Hedrock awakened with a start, but he calmed swiftly as he felt the steady pressure on his body. It was strong, like the current of a very heavy wind. But now that he had taken the first shock, it was bearable. He ached to leap up and examine the speedometer. But he held himself where he was. He was acutely conscious of the tingling readjustments going on in his body, the electronic, atomic, molecular, neural, muscular readjustments. He gave himself thirty minutes before moving. Then he headed for the control boards and peered into the ’stats. But there was nothing to see.

The calendar said August 29th, 11:03 p.m., and the speedometer was down to three hundred and fifty million miles. At his present deceleration, the lifeboat should come to a full stop in about thirty-two days, at most.

The third day also showed a reduction of more than eleven million miles a second. The hollow feeling went slowly out of him, as he watched the average of deceleration develop steadily hour by dragging hour.

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