Science fiction; Space ships -- Fiction; Space warfare -- Fiction
"Yeah, it would be interesting--'sa shame we won't be alive then,"
Seaton responded, "but in the meantime we've got a lot of work to do
for ourselves. Now that we've got this mess straightened out I think
we had better tell these folks good-by, get into _Two_, and hop out to
where Dot's _Skylark of Valeron_ is going to materialize."
The farewell to the people of Valeron was brief, but sincere.
"This is in no sense good-by," Crane concluded. "By the aid of these
newly discovered forces of the sixth order there shall soon be worked
out a system of communication by means of which all the inhabited
planets of the Galaxies shall be linked as closely as are now the
cities of any one world."
_Skylark Two_ shot upward and outward, to settle into an orbit well
outside that of Valeron. Seaton then sent his projection back to the
capital city, fitted over his imaged head the controller of the inner
brain, and turned to Crane with a grin.
"That's timing it, old son--she finished herself up less than an hour
ago. Better cluster around and watch this, folks, it's going to be
good."
* * * * *
At Seaton's signal the structure which was to be the nucleus of the new
space traveler lifted effortlessly into the air its millions of tons of
dead weight and soared, as lightly as little _Two_ had done, out into
the airless void. Taking up a position a few hundred miles away from
the Terrestrial cruiser, it shot out a spherical screen of force to
clear the ether of chance bits of débris. Then inside that screen there
came into being a structure of gleaming inoson, so vast in size that to
the startled onlookers it appeared almost of planetary dimensions.
"Good heavens--it's stupendous!" Dorothy exclaimed. "What did you boys
make it so big for--just to show us you could, or what?"
"Hardly! She's just as small as she can be and still do the work.
You see, to find our own Galaxy we will have to project a beam to a
distance greater than any heretofore assigned diameter of the universe,
and to control it really accurately its working base and the diameter
of its hour and declination-circles would each have to be something
like four light-years long. Since a ship of that size is of course
impracticable, Mart and I did some figuring and decided that with
circles one thousand kilometers in diameter we could chart Galaxies
accurately enough to find the one we're looking for--if you think of
it, you'll realize that there are a lot of hundredth-millimeter marks
around the circumference of circles of that size--and that they would
probably be big enough to hold a broadcasting projection somewhere
near a volume of space as large as that occupied by the Green System.
Therefore we built the _Skylark of Valeron_ just large enough to
contain those thousand-kilometer circles."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account