Science fiction; Space ships -- Fiction; Space warfare -- Fiction
"Nongravitational, of course, or we couldn't feel it--it'd affect
everything about the ship alike. What's the answer, Mart, if any?"
Seaton demanded. "Suppose that they've taken hold of us with a tractor
ray and are taking us for a ride?"
"It would appear that way. I wonder if the visiplates are still
practical?" Crane moved over to number one visiplate and turned it in
every direction. Nothing was visible in the abysmal, all-engulfing,
almost palpable darkness of the absolute black outside the hull of the
vessel.
"It wouldn't work, hardly," Seaton commented. "Look at our time
here--we must be 'way beyond light. I doubt if we could see anything,
even if we had a sixth-order projector--which of course we haven't."
"But how about our light inside here, then?" asked Margaret. "The lamps
are burning, and we can see things."
"I don't know, Peg," Seaton replied. "All this stuff is 'way past me.
Maybe it's because the lights are traveling with us--no, that's out.
Probably, as I intimated before, we aren't seeing things at all--just
feeling them, some way or other. That must be it, I think--it's sure
that the light-waves from those lamps are almost perfectly stationary,
as far as we're concerned."
"Oh, there's something!" Dorothy called. She had remained at the
visiplate, staring into the impenetrable darkness. "See, it just
flashed on! We're falling toward ground of some kind. It doesn't look
like any planet I ever saw before, either--it's perfectly endless and
it's perfectly flat."
The others rushed to the plates and saw, instead of the utter
blackness of a moment before, an infinite expanse of level, uncurving
hyperland. Though so distant from it that any planetary curvature
should have been evident, they could perceive no such curvature. Flat
that land was, and sunless, but apparently self-luminous; glowing with
a strong, somewhat hazy, violet light. And now they could also see
the craft which had been towing them. It was a lozenge-shaped affair,
glowing fiercely with the peculiarly livid "light" of the hyperplanet;
and was now apparently exerting its maximum tractive effort in a vain
attempt to hold the prodigious mass of _Skylark Two_ against the
seemingly slight force of gravitation.
"Must be some kind of hyperlight that we're seeing by," Seaton
cogitated. "Must be sixth or seventh-order velocity, at least, or we'd
be--"
"Never mind the light or our seeing things!" Dorothy interrupted. "We
are falling, and we shall probably hit hard. Can't you do something
about it?"
"Afraid not, Kitten." He grinned at her. "But I'll try it--Nope,
everything's dead. No power, no control, no nothing, and there won't be
until we snap back where we belong. But don't worry about a crash. Even
if that ground is solid enough to crash us, and I don't think it is,
everything out here, including gravity, seems to be so feeble that it
won't hurt us any."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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