Interstellar travel -- Fiction; Science fiction; Television programs -- Fiction
"It's fifth magnitude," said the pilot happily. "We really did pile on
the horses!"
Jones looked momentarily pleased again. Cochrane said in a voice that
even to himself sounded outraged:
"You mean the sun's a fifth-magnitude star from here? What the devil
happened?"
"Booster," said Jones, nearly with enthusiasm. "When the field was just
a radiation speed-up, I used forty milliamperes of current to the square
centimetre of field-plate. That was the field-strength when we sent the
signal-rocket across the crater. For the distress-torpedo test, I
stepped the field-strength up. I used a tenth of an ampere per square
centimetre. I told you! And don't you remember that I wondered what
would happen if I used a capacity-storage system?"
Cochrane held fast to a hand-hold.
"The more power you put into your infernal field," he demanded, "the
more speed you get?"
Jones said contentedly:
"There's a limit. It depends on the temperature of the things in the
field. But I've fixed up the field, now, like a spot-welding outfit.
Like a strobe-light. We took off with a light field. It's on now--we
have to keep it on. But I got hold of some pretty storage condensers. I
hooked them up in parallel to get a momentary surge of high-amperage
current when I shorted them through my field-making coils. Couldn't make
it a steady current! Everything would blow! But I had a surge of
probably six amps per square centimetre for a while."
Cochrane swallowed.
"The field was sixty times as strong as the one the distress-torpedo
used? We went--we're going--sixty times as fast?"
"We had lots more speed than that!" But then Jones' enthusiasm dwindled.
"I haven't had time to check," he said unhappily. "It's one of the
things I want to get at right away. But in theory the field should
modify the effect of inertia as the fourth power of its strength. Sixty
to the fourth is--."
"How far," demanded Cochrane, "is Proxima Centaurus? That's the nearest
star to Earth. How near did we come to reaching it?"
The pilot on the other side of the control-room said with a trace less
than his former zest:
"That looks like Sirius, over there ..."
"We didn't head for Proxima Centaurus," said Jones mildly. "It's too
close! And we have to keep the field-plate back on the moon lined up
with us, more or less, so we headed out roughly along the moon's axis.
Toward where its north pole points."
"Then where are we headed? Where are we going?"
"We're not going anywhere just yet," said Jones without interest. "We
have to find out where we are, and from that--"
Cochrane ran his hand through his hair.
"Look!" he protested. "Who's running this show? You didn't tell me you
were going to take off! You didn't pick out a destination! You didn't--"
Jones said very patiently:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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