Interstellar travel -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories; Space ships -- Fiction
There was a faint mutter from the auxiliary speaker as Harding gave
some instructions to Garvin. Engle took a last look at the viewscreen;
at blue-green Earth looming large in the center, Orion and Sirius
glittering above it and the sun burning bright and yellow on the right.
It was a scene he had observed many times before, all very familiar and
normal--
The chronometer touched 11:50 and normalcy vanished.
Earth and sun and stars fled away from him, altering in appearance
as they went, shrinking, dwindling. The seas and continents of Earth
erupted and shook and boiled before Earth faded and disappeared. The
sun changed from yellow to green to blue, to a tiny point of bright
violet light that raced away into the blackness filling the screen and
faded and disappeared as Earth had done.
Then the viewscreen was black, utterly, completely, dead black. And the
communicator that had connected him with Ground Control was silent,
without the faintest whisper of background sound or space static.
In the silence the voice of Harding as he spoke to Garvin came through
the speaker; puzzled, incredulous, almost shocked:
"Our velocity couldn't have been that great--_and the sun receded into
the ultraviolet!_"
There was the quick sound of hurrying footsteps then the more distant
sound of the computer's keys being operated at a high rate of speed. He
wanted to ask what had gone wrong but he knew no one would answer him.
And it would be a pointless question--it was obvious from Harding's
tone that he did not know, either.
He had an unpleasant feeling that Man's first venture into another
dimension had produced catastrophic results. What had caused sun and
Earth to disappear so quickly--and what force had riven and disfigured
Earth?
Then he realized the significance of Harding's statement about the sun
receding into the ultraviolet.
If the ship had been traveling at a high velocity away from the sun,
the wave length of the sun's light would have been increased in
proportion to the speed of the ship. The sun should have disappeared
in the long-wave infrared end of the spectrum, not the short-wave
ultraviolet.
With the thought came the explanation of the way the continents
and oceans of Earth had quivered and seethed. The shifting of the
spectrum range had shortened normally visible rays into invisibly
short ultraviolet radiations while at the same time formerly invisible
long infrared radiations had been shortened into visible wave
lengths. There had been a continuous displacement into and past the
ultraviolet and each wave length would have reflected best from a
different place--mountains, valleys, oceans, deserts, warm areas, cool
areas,--and the steady progression into the ultraviolet had revealed
each area in quick succession and given the appearance of agitated
movement.
So there was no catastrophe and everything had a logical explanation.
Except how they could have been approaching a sun that he had seen
clearly, visibly, racing away from them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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