If you stretched your eyeballs and were good at reading dots, that image looked an awful lot like my back!
I twiddled the knob again. It made the image leave again. The image, now that I was more accustomed to it, looked defeated, all caved in! It made me angry. I wouldn’t be leaving this room, all caved in! I thrust the time-sight back at him.
He read the diaclass="underline" “Six minutes and twenty-four seconds. What did you see?”
I wasn’t going to let him win anything. I shrugged. But I was cross.
“You have to have this to steer a ship running at high speeds,” he said. “It tells you in advance whether you have run into anything and you can, in now, steer to avoid doing that. Life can alter things.”
I determined right then to change leaving this room, caved in. “None of this excuses running these engines flat-out just to get there so we can wait!”
“Oh, yes,” said Heller, recollecting what we were supposed to be talking about. “The Will-be Was engines.
“Now, in the center of a Will-be Was there is an ordinary warp-drive engine just to give power and influence space. There is a sensor, not unlike this time-sight, but very big. It reads where time predetermines a mass to be. Then the engine makes a synthetic mass that time incorrectly reads to be half as big as a planet. The ordinary power plant thrusts this apparent mass against time itself. According to the time pattern, that mass, apparently HUGE, should not be there. Time rejects it. You get a thrust from the rejection. But, of course, the thrust is far too great as the mass is only synthetic. This causes the engine base to be literally hurled through space.
“You can feel a slight unsteadiness in the ship. A jumpiness. That’s because the drive is operating intermittently. As soon as it is hurled, it then sends another false message to time and is hurled again.
“Unfortunately, on a ship this light, having so little mass, the cycle just keeps on adding up. The sensors read the new time determination, the synthetic mass is again slammed against time, time rejects it. ‘Will-be,’ says the mass synthesizer. ‘Was,’ insists time. Over and over. And the speed simply tries to rise up to infinity. There’s no friction except an energy wake, no real work to do, so fuel efficiency is good.
“The ship travels in the opposite direction to which the core drive in the Will-be Was converter is pointed. So steering is done by moving the direction of the small internal engine.
“As you are travelling far, far faster than the speed of light, the visual image of an obstruction can’t reach you in time and you have to guide the vessel by spotting future collisions. You see yourself collide, using the time-sight, with some heavenly mass in the future, so you change your course in the present and you don’t collide. Life can control such things.
“Battleships have big time-sights geared to their speed. But this one is manual and has to be adjusted.”
With a pop, the screen blew out. That startled me. I said, “You should shield those engines so they don’t spray power all over the ship!”
“Oh, these sparks aren’t from the engine room. We’re travelling so fast that we are intercepting too many photons — light particles from stars. We’re also crossing force lines of gravity you wouldn’t ordinarily detect, but at this speed, it kind of makes us into an electric motor. We are picking up incidental charge faster than we can use it or shed it.”
“You were going to fix that!” I had him there.
He shrugged. Then he brightened. “You want to see it?”
Before I could protest, he reached over and hit the buttons that turned the whole black surround of walls into a viewscreen which gave the exterior scene of space we were in!
Suddenly, I was just perched on a chair and floor that existed like a platform in space.
I almost fainted.
I have seen a high-speed boat going through a lake, throwing up enormous fans of spray and leaving a vast turbulence of writhing wake. Turn that yellow-green[2] and make it three-dimensional and that was what I was looking at.
Horrifying!
The energy shedding flared out in twisting, terrifying sworls to every side!
Behind us, for what might be a hundred miles, the collisions of tortured particles still churned!
“My Gods!” I yelled. “Is that why Tug Two blew up?”
He seemed to be admiring the churning Hells around us. It took him a bit to notice I had spoken.
“Oh, no,” he said, “I don’t think that was why she blew up. Could have been, but not really likely.”
He was punching some buttons on the small independent viewscreen he had been playing the game on. “I was calculating what my ability to jump and my rate of fall would be on Blito-P3. The figures are still in the bank, so I’ll use the gravity of Earth to show you.”
The Hells around us roared on. The small screen lit up. “Our average speed of this trip is 516,166,166 miles a second. Our top speed at midvoyage when we changed over to decelerate was 1,032,885,031 miles per second. This is pretty small, really, as the trip is only about twenty-two light-years. Intergalactic travel, where one goes at least two million light-years, attains speeds much greater than that. It’s the distance that determines the speed, you see.
“There’s not much dust and not many photons between galaxies, so you don’t get all this electronic wake like you do inside a galaxy where there’s lots of energy.” He looked at the horrible wash. “Pretty, isn’t it.”
He recalled himself to his task. “Anyway, my theory is that Tug Two never blew up because of that stuff.”
Heller hit some more buttons. “Anyway, I was figuring what my jump and fall on Blito-P3 would be, so we’ll use Earth gravity as the amount for G. Also, I set our ship up for Earth G, as it will be operating there and I wanted to get used to it.
“This ship has gravity synthesizers, of course. You couldn’t ride in it at these speeds if it didn’t. Our acceleration has been 42,276,330 feet per second per second. You have to have that much constant acceleration to attain these speeds. A body can tolerate no more than two or three G’s for any period of time. Actually, if you experienced four to six G’s longer than six seconds, you could expect restricted muscular activity because of apparent increased body weight; you would lose peripheral vision and gray out; then you would lose central vision, black out and go unconscious because the blood would be pulled from the head to pool in the lower parts of the body.
“At this acceleration the gravity synthesizers are handling an awful lot more than that. I think Tug Two blew up because her gravity synthesizers failed.”
“Well,” I said, refusing to be impressed. “How many gravities are they handling?”
“To counteract the acceleration, this equipment is handling…” He pointed at the screen.
It said:
1,289,401.409 G’s!
I tried to get my heart back down out of my throat. It meant my body, in the absence of synthesizers, would weigh 1,289,401.409 times what it normally did, due solely to acceleration and, now, deceleration!
“So,” said Heller, “I don’t think Tug Two blew up at all. I think the gravity synthesizers failed and her crew simply went splat! She may be somewhere in the universe now, still hurtling along as plasma. They only knew she disappeared. That’s why I didn’t bother with the problem. I hope the contractors did a good job on the gravity synthesizers. We were pushed to leave so fast that I didn’t get too much chance to test the new installation.”
He smiled reassuringly as the screen spark-flashed and blew out. “So don’t be worried about the tug blowing up. It won’t. It’s we who would go bang, not the tug.”
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