Wordlessly she pressed his arm. They went together to the air-lock. Rod Cantrell composed his face so that nobody could guess his inner feelings. The lock-doors opened and they entered.
Immediately there was the oddly pleasant smell of growing things which came from the air-purifying set-up. It was partly experimental still, but it demonstrably worked. The air in the ship had been kept fresh and breathable for more than six weeks, despite the men who worked inside the hull, by specially-bred plant life kept in hydroponic tanks.
There were chemical purifiers in reserve of course but normally the ship's air would be restored to normal as the air of Earth is kept sweet—by plants. There was even a section of the air-room in which food-plants were being tried out for the same purpose, turning out foodstuffs as a byproduct of the purification of the ship's atmosphere.
In hydroponic tanks, vegetables grew with amazing luxuriance. The Stellaris would not be quite self-sustaining but there should be at least occasional meals of dewy-fresh vegetables even when the ship was on the far side of Orion.
Rod Cantrell and Kit stepped into the unfinished interior of the ship. The smells of work were noticeable, though work had stopped for the lunch-hour. Rod looked lonesomely about. In all probability, he would never set foot in the Stellaris again.
The smell of vegetation was strong and pleasant, but there was the smell of paint too and the curious odor of heated metal cooling off—all the aromas of uncompleted construction. In a room designed for storage four painters ate their lunch companionably from lunch-boxes, rather than bother to leave the ship. An electrician smoked restfully beside his tools.
They went into the engine-room, in which there would be no single massively-moving part. A tiny isotopic generator made its humming noise. It was built around a block of artificially radioactive material which gave off electrons alone, with no neutrons or mesons or gamma rays. It yielded utterly safe power and when its total output was not needed for the ship's purposes, the excess free electrons were absorbed in another artificial isotope, which, in absorbing them, become converted into the parent substance.
A fuel-supply for years of operation thus had necessarily been built into the ship when it was made.
The field-generators, too, were all complete. They had been tested with the Stellaris safely anchored at bow and stern with tractor-beams. Rod regarded the generators hungrily. He'd designed them and they had features of which he was very proud. But now he'd never be able to see for himself how his designs stood up under service conditions.
"You know how the force-fields work," he said almost wistfully to Kit "In theory there are an indefinite number of dimensions, therefore an indefinite number of—I suppose you'd call them universes—in parallel. Our universe hangs together because all its parts attract each other magnetically and there are gravitational linkages all through space.
"There's an incredibly complex network of electrostatic stresses by which even island universes attract each other. So our universe is stable. But if all the forces that link an object to our cosmos—the things that tie it in—are cut it falls out of the universe we know.
"It goes apparently into a dark universe, where there seem to be no stars. Maybe it's a dead universe where the process of entropy is complete, where all the energy of the system has run down. But we don't know yet"
Kit nodded wisely. In the late rebellion of the Total State the city of Pittsburgh had vanished between two heart-beats with some millions of human beings. Washington had been slated to go next and Rod Cantrell had been duped—or so it was thought by the war lords of the Total State—into operating the weapon which would destroy it.
But he'd understood their weapon a little too well and it had been turned terribly against them by his understanding. Now the Earth Government ruled undisputed again—and the Earth Government had taken from Rod his chance to go with the Stellaris to the void between the stars. Because he'd made a report that nobody wanted to believe
"These generators," said Rod wistfully, "make a field close about the Stellaris which cuts every natural link between the ship and the million-billion suns of our universe. Electrostatic stresses can't go through that field. Gravitation doesn't penetrate. Magnetic lines of force are stopped. So the ship leaves our universe. As Pittsburgh did. Only—we leave one link of our own making.
"We leave a tractor-beam in existence pulling the ship toward one spot. A tractor-beam can penetrate the field that cuts off everything else. And the ship is drawn to the one spot the tractor-beam is focused on, although it moves in a parallel universe and isn't in our cosmos at all. When it stops at the object the beam is pulling we cut off the force-fields and apparently all back into our own space. But we've traveled!"
Kit nodded again. She knew all this of course but Rod was heartbroken and it helped him to talk.
"And," he said wistfully as he led the way out of the engine-room, "a pressor-beam works the same way. We can push away from a place we want to start from, instead of waiting for a tractor to reach out a few light-years to our destination."
He sounded almost enthusiastic as he went along the straight-line corridor between the engine-room and the control-cabin—as yet practically empty of controls.
"My trip to Calypso proved," he added, "the mass-inertia ratio in the dark universe I actually traveled in, isn't the same as in our universe. The speed of light is higher—much higher. The time I took to get to Mars suggested it and the trip to Calypso proved that the constants of the two spaces are different. I reached Calypso through the dark universe faster than light could make the trip through ours!"
Then he stopped. He'd reached the control-room from which he'd expected to direct the Stellaris. There was the big instrument-board with practically none of the intended instruments set into place. The switches that had been installed were taped to the "off position, to avoid accident. They'd been used just once, when the force-field generators were tried out and the ship—kept from traveling by anchoring tractor-beams holding her fast—had gone into the dark universe for minutes.
"But," said Rod, after an instant, "that's that"
He stood grimly in the ship he was now forbidden to command.
Then, just as he turned to lead Kit outside again, there came a sudden sharp crackling sound from somewhere in the ship. It had the violent harsh timbre of an electric arc. Somebody shouted frantically. By sheer instinct Rod Cantrell plunged toward the scene of emergency.
But he didn't get there. Suddenly he seemed to be falling endlessly, horribly, nightmarishly, with no weight and no grip on anything. There were vision-ports in the control-room, intended to permit a view of a landscape or of the stars. As the crackling roar grew thunderous those vision-ports turned red, then orange, then flashed through the spectrum to violet and beyond.
The vision-ports became filled with utter blackness and on the instant the control-room was as dark as any cave on Earth and Rod and Kit seemed to be hurtling blindly through sheer opacity. Kit uttered a strangled cry. She had left the floor when weight vanished. She had the hysterical sensation of an increasing, breathtaking dive.
There were screamings somewhere. There was a strange metallic smell of vaporized cable. There was a pungent reek of ozone. The roaring seemed to grow yet louder and the panic-stricken cries grew with it There came the stench of burned insulation and then of sooty smoke.
Kit cried out again, "Rod!"
He said in a coldly savage voice. "Steady! You're not falling. The fields went on from a short-circuit somewhere in the ship. Now the ship's on fire and we're in the dark universe—traveling. Steady!"