He was about to move away from the doorway when loudspeakers all over the ship blared, chorus; “Attention all passengers! Attention all passengers! Breakout from overdrive coming! Breakout from overdrive coming!”
There were unhappy sounds here and there. Overdrive was the only conceivable way by which space traffic could be moved across light-centuries of space. But ways to mitigate the physical discomfort of going into or out of it had not been developed successfully.
“This is a checkpoint breakout, at Checkpoint Lambda,” the voice said cheerfully. “If you wish, stewards will provide you with anti-malaise pills to reduce breakout discomfort. We are required by law to report our passage past the checkpoints set up along the space lanes we follow. Usually that is all that happens. Today, though, we have a passenger to transfer by tentacle to the buoy Lambda. It will be interesting to watch. This checkpoint buoy was formerly a crack interstellar liner. In its day—”
Scott moved tiff to the control room as the brisk voice described the former liner now floating as a hulk in emptiness. It was still equipped with the solar system drive-engines which could shift its position about the local sun, but they could not conceivably drive it to any other solar system. Here it was, and here it must remain, depending on passing ships for its contacts with the rest of the galaxy. The voice mentioned antennas and radar-mirrors and telemetering equipment as if they were strange. It pictured the transfer of a passenger by space tentacle as an operation of vast interest. Scott reached the control room and heard a mate off to one side completing the saccharine speech into a microphone. The skipper nodded a greeting. He looked uneasy. Every skipper worried about breakout. There was no authenticated record of a ship breaking out to collide immediately with a planet or asteroid or a sun’s blazing photosphere, but a ship did come back to normal space almost at random.
A voice from overhead in the control room said with careful distinctness, “When the gong sounds, breakout will be exactly in five seconds.”
There was a slow, monotonous tick-tock-tick-tock. It lasted an interminable time. Then a recorded gong sounded, and the same carefully distinct voice said, “Five—four—three—two—one—”
The vision-screens flickered. Everybody on the liner felt a ghastly dizziness, and the sensations of a spinning, spiral fall. Then there was nausea, quick and sharp and revolting, but mercifully it lasted only a heartbeat.
Then the screens blazed with light. A thousand million specks of brightness glittered upon the formerly rust-red screens. A tinny voice said, “Checkpoint Lambda. Checkpoint Lambda. Report. Report,” and a tiny whining sound began to come from the liner’s automatically taped log which was now broadcasting in a high-speed transmission for the checkpoint to record. The Milky Way sprawled across no less than four vision-screens, and the distorted black nebula, the Coalsack, loomed large and near. It was of another shape than when seen from Earth. To the left, and ahead, a bright yellow sun with a barely perceptible disk shone luridly. There were peculiar luminosities close by. They would be the Five Comets of Canis Lambda; matters of interest to professional astronomers but not usually to anybody else. Scott, though, regarded them with a frown. The liner’s skipper shook his head.
“Good that we broke out short,” he observed. “I’d hate to come out of overdrive close to them!”
Scott said nothing. All overdrive runs were timed to stop short of their destination, with shorter jumps to closer approximation. The odds against collisions on breakout were enormous, and research expeditions had actually penetrated the hearts of those clumped meteoric hordes which were cometary heads and nuclei. But that was a hair-raising trick, and possible only by the most tedious and painstaking matching of velocities. One definitely wouldn’t want to break out inside a comet. And meteor-streams trailed most of them. The Five Comets of Canis Lambda were particularly undesirable close neighbors for space craft. Two robot checkpoints in succession had vanished from orbit around this sun. Still, most ships merely reported their passage there and went on to the infinite emptiness beyond.
“Umph,” said the skipper. “We’ll go on in.”
The operation of approaching a landing was much more complicated on a liner than on a Patrol ship. There was verification of the ecliptic plane. There was careful measurement of distance. Micrometric adjustment of the short-jump relay. A man couldn’t time an overdrive jump to less than the fiftieth of a second. A properly timed relay could split a fifty-thousandth. The figures were checked, and checked again, and the settings made and verified. All the while the ceiling speaker continued to repeat metallically, “Checkpoint Lambda. Checkpoint Lambda. Report. Report.” The call had been traveling at the speed of light for almost an hour before the liner picked it up from the yet unseen and unseeable space buoy. The liner’s automatic reply was now traveling back to it. But the ship itself would get there before its broadcast.
Another warning to passengers. A gong. A countdown. Then there was dizziness once more, and the feeling of falling, and intolerable nausea. The screens flickered and rearranged the innumerable specks of light which were stars. And then, suddenly, the sun Canis Lambda was blindingly bright with a disk half-a-degree across, and the call from the ceiling speaker became a shout for the fraction of a syllable before the automatic volume-control cut it down.
The skipper looked pleased. One does not often have a chance to show off before a Patrol man. He watched complacently, giving no orders, while the direction of the checkpoint signal was ascertained and its distance measured. Then the liner began to drive toward it on that slow solar system drive by which men first explored the planets of the First System. It was necessary for lift-offs and landings.
But Scott stared ahead. The Five Comets were heading in toward the sun; five separate luminosities, some larger and some smaller, some with enormous trailing tails and others with lesser ones. All were concentrated in one very small region of the sky.
Scott didn’t like the look of things, but unless he knew their distance he couldn’t tell how close together they really were. Even then, distances in space were not easily realized. There was no believable sensation of depth where astronomical objects were concerned. Everything looked flat. It was impossible to see more than angular relationships. Actual distances were no more than numerals on paper. But still Scott didn’t like what he saw.
“Very nice work,” he said politely. “I’ll go get into my vacuum-suit. I’ll be back by the time you’ve raised the buoy.”
He went back to his cabin and changed his civilian clothes for his uniform. He put on the Patrol space suit that was so much less bulky than the vacuum equipment used on merchant ships. It took a considerable time. Then he picked up the report he’d prepared and returned to the control room. The skipper was red-faced and angry and apprehensive.
“Look here!” he greeted Scott indignantly. “They got our approach-call. They said, ‘What ship’s that?’ When I told them they didn’t answer! They don’t answer now!”
As if deliberately to contradict him, the communicator-speaker said harshly. “There is nothing to come aboard you. No freight or passengers will be accepted. Proceed on your voyage. Message ends.”
The skipper looked at Scott.
“What am I to do?”
“Proceed on your voyage,” said Scott drily, “as far as the space buoy.” He hesitated a moment, then said, “As an extreme precaution, put a man by the overdrive button. Set it up to move the ship a short jump away—if they get too insistent.”