Out Around Rigel Part 2

But before I could begin to think of any plan, my eye was caught by the red lamp flashing on the panel. I pressed the attention b.u.t.ton before the alarm could ring, then started looking for the body we were in danger of striking. The position indicators pointed straight ahead, but I could see nothing. For ten minutes I peered through the telescope, and still no sign. The dials put the thing off a degree or so to the right now, but that was too close. In five more minutes I would swing straight up and give whatever it was a wide berth.

I looked out again. In the angle between the cross hairs, wasn't there a slight haze? In a moment it was clear. A comet, apparently, the two of us racing toward each other. Bigger it grew and bigger, hurtling forward. Would we hit?

The dials put it up a little and far off to the right, but it was still frightening. The other light had come on, too, and I saw that we had been pulled off our course by the comet's attraction. I threw the nose over, past on the other side for leeway, then straightened up as the side-distance dial gave a big jump away. Though the gaseous globe, tailless of course away from the sun, showed as big as the full Earth, the danger was past.

As I watched, the comet vanished from the field of the telescope. Five minutes, perhaps, with the red danger light flickering all the time.

Then, with a ghastly flare through the right hand windows, it had pa.s.sed us.

Garth sat straight up. "What happened?" he yelled.

"Just a comet. I got by all right."

He settled back, having been scarcely awake, and I turned to the board again. The danger light had gone out, but the direction indicator was burning. The near approach of the comet had thrown us off our course by several degrees. I straightened the ship up easily, and had only a little more difficulty in stopping a rocking motion. Then again the empty hours of watching, gazing into the stars.

Precisely at the end of eighteen hours, Garth awakened, as if the consummation of a certain number of internal processes had set off a little alarm clock in his brain. We were forty-one hours out, with a speed, according to the indicator, of one hundred and twenty-eight times that of light, and a total distance covered of slightly over one quarter of a light-year. A rather small stretch, compared to the 466 light-years we had to go. But when I went back for a look out of the rear telescope, the familiar stars seemed to have moved the least bit closer together, and the sun was no brighter than a great number of them.

I slept like a log, but awakened a little before my trick was due.

Exactly on schedule, fourteen days and some hours after we had started off, we pa.s.sed Pi Orionis. For long there had been no doubt in my mind that, whatever the explanation, our acceleration was holding steady. In the last few hours the star swept up to the brilliance of the sun, then faded again until it was no brighter than Venus. Venus! Our sun itself had been a mere dot in the rear telescope until the change in our course threw it out of the field of vision.

At sixty-five light-years, twenty-three days out, Beta Eridani was almost directly in our path for Rigel. Slightly less than a third of the distance to the midpoint, in over half the time. But our speed was still increasing 200 miles a second every second, almost four times the speed of light in an hour. Our watches went on with a not altogether disagreeable monotony.

There was no star to mark the middle of our journey. Only, toward the close of one of my watches, a blue light which I had never noticed came on beside the indicator dials, and I saw that we had covered 233 light-years, half the estimated distance to Rigel. The speed marker indicated 3975 times the speed of light. I wakened Garth.

"You could have done it yourself," he complained, sleepily, "but I suppose it's just as well."

He went over to the board and started warming up the rear gravity projector.

"We'll turn one off as the other goes on. Each take one control, and go a notch at a time." He began counting, "One, two, three ..."

On the twentieth count, my dial was down to zero, his up to maximum deceleration, and I pulled out my switch. Garth snapped sideways a lever on the indicators. Though nothing seemed to happen, I knew that the speed dial would creep backward, and the distance dial progress at a slower and slower rate. While I was trying to see the motion, Garth had gone back to bed. I turned again to the gla.s.s and looked out at Rigel, on the cross hairs, and Kappa Orionis, over to the left, and the great nebula reaching over a quarter of the view with its faint gaseous streamers.

And so we swept on through s.p.a.ce, with Rigel a great blue glory ahead, and new stars, invisible at greater distances, flaring up in front of us and then fading into the background as we pa.s.sed. For a long time we had been able to see that Rigel, as inferred from spectroscopic evidence, was a double star--a fainter, greener blue companion revolving with it around their common center of gravity. Beyond Kappa Orionis, three hundred light-years from the sun, the s.p.a.ce between the two was quite evident. Beyond four hundred light-years, the brilliance of the vast star was so great that it dimmed all the other stars by comparison, and made the nebula seem a mere faint gauze. And yet even with this gradual change, our arrival was a surprise.

When he relieved me at my watch, Garth seemed dissatisfied with our progress. "It must be farther than they've figured. I'll stick at twenty-five times light speed, and slow down after we get there by taking an orbit."

"I'd have said it was nearer than the estimate," I tried to argue, but was too sleepy to remember my reasons. Propped up on one elbow, I looked around and out at the stars. There was a bright splash of light, I noticed, where the telescope concentrated the radiation of Rigel at one spot on the screen. I slept, and then Garth was shouting in my ear:

"We're there!"

I opened my eyes, blinked, and shut them again in the glare.

"I've gone around three or four times trying to slow down. We're there, and there's a planet to land on."

At last I could see. Out the window opposite me, Rigel was a blue-white disk half the size of the sun, but brighter, with the companion star a sort of faint reflection five or ten degrees to the side. And still beyond, as I shaded my eyes, I could see swimming in the black a speck with the unmistakable glow of reflected light.

With both gravity projectors in readiness, we pulled out of our orbit and straight across toward the planet, letting the attraction of Rigel fight against our still tremendous speed. For a while, the pull of the big star was almost overpowering. Then we got past, and into the gravitational field of the planet. We spiralled down around it, looking for a landing place and trying to match our speed with its rotational velocity.

From rather unreliable observations, the planet seemed a good deal smaller than the moon, and yet so dense as to have a greater gravitational attraction. The atmosphere was cloudless, and the surface a forbidding expanse of sand. The globe whirled at a rate that must give it a day of approximately five hours. We angled down, picking a spot just within the lighted area.

A landing was quite feasible. As we broke through the atmosphere, we could see that the sand, although blotched with dark patches here and there, was comparatively smooth. At one place there was a level outcropping of rock, and over this we hung. It was hard work, watching through the single small port in the floor as we settled down. Finally the view was too small to be of any use. I ran to the side window, only to find my eyes blinded by Rigel's blaze. Then we had landed, and almost at the same moment Rigel set. Half overlapped by the greater star, the faint companion had been hidden in its glare. Now, in the dusk, a corner of it hung ghostlike on the horizon, and then too had disappeared.

I flashed on our lights, while Garth cut out the projector and the floor gravity machine. The increase in weight was apparent, but not particularly unpleasant. After a few minutes of walking up and down I got used to it.

Through a stop-c.o.c.k in the wall, Garth had drawn in a tube of gas from the atmosphere outside, and was a.n.a.lyzing it with a spectroscope.

"We can go out," he said. "It's unbreathable, but we'll be able to use the s.p.a.ce suits. Mostly fluorine. It would eat your lungs out like that!"

"And the suits?"

"Fortunately, they've been covered with helio-beryllium paint, and the helmet gla.s.s is the same stuff. Not even that atmosphere can touch it. I suppose there can be no life on the place. With all this sand, it would have to be based on silicon instead of carbon--and it would have to breathe fluorine!"

He got out the suits--rather like a diver's with the body of metal-painted cloth, and the helmet of the metal itself. On the shoulders was an air supply cylinder. The helmets were fixed with radio, so we could have talked to each other even in airless s.p.a.ce. We said almost anything to try it out.

"Glad you brought two, and we don't have to explore in shifts."

"Yes, I was prepared for emergencies."

"Shall we wait for daylight to go out?"

"I can't see why. And these outfits will probably feel better in the cool. Let's see."

We shot a searchlight beam out the window. There was a slight drop down from the rock where we rested, then the sandy plain stretching out. Only far off were those dark patches that looked like old seaweed on a dried-up ocean bed, and might prove dangerous footing. The rest seemed hard packed.

My heart was pounding as we went into the air-lock and fastened the inner door behind us.

"We go straight out now," Garth explained. "Coming back, it will be necessary to press this b.u.t.ton and let the pump get rid of the poisonous, air before going in."

I opened the outer door and started to step out, then realized that there was a five-foot drop to the ground.

"Go ahead and jump," Garth said. "There's a ladder inside I should have brought, but it would be too much trouble to go back through the lock for it. Either of us can jump eight feet at home, and we'll get back up somehow."

I jumped, failing to allow for the slightly greater gravity, and fell sprawling. Garth got down more successfully, in spite of a long package of some sort he carried in his hand.

Scrambling down from the cliff and walking out on the sand, I tried to get used to the combination of greater weight and the awkward suit. If I stepped very deliberately it was all right, but an attempt to run sank my feet in the sand and brought me up staggering. There was no trouble seeing through the gla.s.s of my helmet over wide angles. Standing on the elevation by the _Comet_, his s.p.a.ce-suit shining in the light from the windows, Garth looked like a metallic monster, some creature of this strange world. And I must have presented to him much the same appearance, silhouetted dark and forbidding against the stars.