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Look to the Stars

<h2>CHAPTER X</h2> Seemingly least imaginative of them all, it was odd that Link should be the first to crack under the strain. From the time of the disclosure that their hull was slowly corroding under the chemical action of the clay, he had appeared frightened and morose. Once or twice, as Marlin approached him on isolated portions of the superstructure, he slunk away in a peculiar manner. One day—for they still called their alternation of sleeping and waking periods a "day"—he failed to show up for meals. When he did not appear the second day, the group aroused from its apathetic indifference sufficiently to institute a search. He was crouching behind some packing boxes in the store room, and fled with wild shrieks on being discovered. He managed to hide himself again, and the search was dropped. Some hours later they discovered him furtively clamboring among the girders overhead. From this time on, the girders became his abode. His weasel face, nearly hidden by the long growth of hair, peered down at them from odd angles with alert suspicion. He resembled an unkempt monkey clad in tattered shirt and trousers. If they attempted to approach or tried to lure him down, he shrieked and chattered at them, and retreated to more precarious heights, until they desisted, fearful of making him fall. "Hunger'll bring him down," DuChane said. And it did. During one of the sleep periods, he raided the store room and created such havoc that Maw Barstow formed a habit of leaving his ration of food and water on a box in plain sight. When all were apparently asleep, he would stealthily slip down and snatch the food, wolfing it like a wild creature, ready to scamper for safety at the slightest noise. Watching from concealment, Marlin saw him do this a couple of times, but made no effort to trap him. And for Marlin, there were more important concerns. Isolated from the rest, he sat for hours at a time before the periscope, trying to arrive at some theory regarding their position in space. One thing was established by now. The sphere had developed a lazy rotation of its own, presenting its two hemispheres alternately to the sun and giving the surface on which the periscope projected a "day" of about five hours. Even without visual observation, the shifting heat areas within the globe would have led to the same conclusion. The clay-like coating seemed to have the property of diffusing the sun's rays throughout its mass. Possibly it would have been burned to a crisp on one side without such rotation. The side which was receiving the direct rays radiated a gentle heat through the walls, and this area of radiation traveled slowly around the circumference. To Marlin, this rotation seemed to deny the activity of the anti-gravity plates, yet the maintenance of gravity indicated that at least they retained some of their function. To account for this seeming paradox and others, he evolved a set of theories. Some he was able to verify. From the first, he had found it difficult to swallow DuChane's surmise that gravity was maintained within the sphere through some mysterious reaction from the obverse surfaces of the repulsion plates. To satisfy his doubts, he wormed his way through a narrow opening between the hull and girders supporting the superstructure, until he reached the edge of a segmented bank of repulsion plates. He found them heavily insulated on the upper side, as if to prevent the force from exerting its full strength in that direction. By lying in a cramped position, he was able to extend an arm through a narrow crevice and to touch the under side of the plates. <hr class="tb" /> His exploring fingers contacted a fragment of some sort—a pebble or hardened lump of clay. Detaching it from the surface, he fingered it exploringly. When his fingers relaxed, the lump escaped and instantly snapped back to the plate, as if held by a taut rubber band. He recovered the fragment and tried the same thing experimentally, with the same result. There was no mistake. Objects released below the anti-gravity plates dropped toward them, just as did objects released from above. If anything, the attraction of the underside was stronger. In point of fact, the supposed anti-gravity plates were gravity plates. Convinced of something he had vaguely suspected, Marlin retired to his usual vantage point—the observation scaffold—to think matters out. He was vaguely disturbed when Sally clambered up the ladder and joined him. "You're up to something?" she accused. "Tell Sally what it's all about." "I'd only bore you." "What's the difference? I'm bored anyway." She sat beside him on the edge of the platform, bare feet protruding from her threadbare slacks. Marlin was quite certain that she wouldn't resist if he put his arm around her, but he squelched any such impulse. Too many times he had seen DuChane's arm occupying that position. "All right," he observed. "You asked for it." He told her what he had discovered. "Well," she asked, "what of it?" "This is the way I'd explain it. I think the criticism of Thornboldt's principle, advanced by orthodox scientists, was probably justified. Such an enormous application of energy would be needed to effect the stress required for anti-gravity polarization, that it was a practical impossibility. Yet somehow this enormous power was generated for the brief moment which marked the plunge of our vessel into outer space." "I think we ought to christen the old ball," she remarked irrelevantly. "How about calling it what Bart suggested—the Thornboldt?" "I suppose the inventor is entitled to some credit," Marlin agreed absently. "But to figure this out: Let's assume a generator or storage battery capable of delivering current of one ampere strength for a hundred hours. Suppose it should release the same amount of current within a single hour. The strength of the current would obviously be multiplied a hundred times, wouldn't it? Suppose the same current were released in a single minute. It would be multiplied six thousand times. Suppose it were released in a second, what would be its strength?" "I'm no good at figures," replied Sally, fidgeting. "Thirty-six thousand amperes!" Marlin told her impressively. "That's a lot of stepping up. Eli claims his batteries are capable of supplying current for several months, and while I don't know their capacity, it must be considerable. Suppose most of this potential current was drained off by the shell of our vessel, acting like a Leyden jar or accumulator, and then released in one titanic discharge. Don't you see? This must have accomplished the near-impossible—the polarization of the repulsion plates, resulting in the anti-gravity reaction." "You sure deal out jawbreakers when you get started," Sally shrugged. "All right," he went on imperturbably. "The intense discharge probably lasted only a moment—but that was sufficient. It shot our sphere away from the earth as if it had been fired from a cannon—sent it with an initial momentum which took us far beyond Earth's attraction and must still be continuing undiminished in the vacuum of space." Sally yawned and rose. "What you need is a classroom," she said. "I'll pass the word along in case any of the rest feel the need of brushing up on their education." <hr class="tb" /> Her departure scarcely disturbed Marlin's train of thought. His theory, of course, gave birth to other perplexing problems. How account for the fact that neither sphere nor passengers were crushed by the enormous acceleration? He had an answer for that one. Logically, he reasoned, they owed their salvation to the fact that they, too, were subject to the momentary repulsion of the activated plates. Repulsion hurled them violently away—acceleration pressed them back. The two forces practically cancelled out. Possibly the insulation on the upper surfaces of the plates gave acceleration a slight edge, causing the crushing sensation Marlin had felt at the onset of their flight. But the anti-gravity force was no longer in effect—probably had lasted not more than a few seconds. What had caused the plates to become imbued with an opposite force—an attractive force akin to gravity? To answer this, Marlin found himself seeking analogies in the realm of electrical phenomena. A magnet, he reflected, is a bar of iron in which the movements of the molecules are so organized as to keep the lines of their magnetic axis parallel—all the molecular north poles pointing toward the same end of the bar. It is accomplished by placing the bar in a larger magnetic field, and it is made permanent by tempering—which fixes the molecules in permanent alignment. Thornboldt's atomic polarization principle must be similar. Under terrific stress, the molecules of the repulsion plates, and their constituent atoms, were polarized in such a way that they exercised the force of repulsion. But when the stress was released, there would be no tempering to maintain the molecular set. They would—in a manner of speaking—snap back, like rubber bands released from tension, not quite to their original condition, but to a condition tending toward the opposite of that occasioned by the stress. The attractive property now inherent in the plates, in other words, was a reaction from the terrific stress of their momentary anti-gravity polarization. It was notable that there had been no interruption of the electrical power which supplied current for cooking and waste incineration, operated the air-purifying apparatus and refrigeration plant, and kept their lighting system in force. Evidently, Marlin decided, the storage batteries—if they had been drained of their charges prior to the impulse which hurled them into space—must have recovered, as batteries do when given a rest. He inclined also to the opinion that the sphere itself generated electricity through the expansion and contraction of the outer coating as it slowly revolved. <hr class="tb" /> Sally appeared to avoid him after this encounter—or so Marlin imagined. He had a notion that she had been piqued by DuChane's pursuit of Norma, and wanted to show the man a thing or two by giving Marlin an opportunity to make love to her. His failure to rise to the bait had not endeared him to her. He told himself that he did not care—but, in truth, he felt his isolation. It was comforting even to have Pearl creep up to the periscope ledge beside him, as she did at rare intervals. He fell into the habit of talking to her, as a relief from the close-mouthed silence that had grown upon him. It was better, at any rate, than talking to himself, and helped him to orient his ideas. "Sometimes, Pearl," he confided, "I have a feeling that you sense what I'm trying to say better than I understand it myself. It's cockeyed—but a fellow develops queer fancies in a weird situation like this." She smiled amiably. "I even find myself assuming that you know what's behind all this. I suppose it's your air of calm assurance—or the lucky way you seemed to hit things back there on Earth. And here I go, with another screwy idea—that there is something behind it all." He applied his eye to the periscope. It was on the night side, and only an impenetrable expanse of blackness, studded with bright, unblinking points of light, rewarded his gaze. Relaxing, he faced the girl. "Reason tells me that we're the victims of a freakish accident. Yet I find myself assuming—" He checked the sentence, glancing around self-consciously for possible eavesdroppers. With a dreamy expression Pearl was looking at—or beyond him. "It's a comfort to talk to you," he confessed. "You make it easier to express the inexpressible. What was I saying? Oh, yes." He frowned. "I get to fancying sometimes that the crew of us were brought together, herded into this incredible monstrosity, and then spewed forth in accordance with some age-old plan. It's almost as if the little world we're in had a life of its own and had been sent forth with the blessings of the parent Earth to work out its own destiny. What do you think, Pearl? In your infinite wisdom—or simplicity—tell me. At least it could be true." The girl's lips parted. "It could be true," she echoed. He shrugged. Often you could get a response from her by making an emphatic effort, but it was usually like this—some amiable repetition of the words you put in her mouth. "All right," he retorted, as if she had contradicted him, "say that I'm screwy! But tell me—what do we know about other possible states of consciousness? We think we understand human consciousness—because we're experiencing it. We credit animals with consciousness because they act in a limited way like humans. But how do we know there aren't other phases of consciousness? How do we know that a tree isn't a conscious entity, or a rock, or this globe—or the Earth? How do we know?" "How do we know?" parroted the girl. She smiled up at his tense features, as if trying to please him. Beyond her, in the shadowy obscurity of the girders, he caught a glimpse of Link's monkey-like face peering furtively down at them. He broke off abruptly. "You're a bad influence, Pearl. You encourage a fellow to voice crazy ideas. First thing I know, I'll be swinging around on girders myself." <hr class="chap" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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