good nature.
So far as Harding was concerned—and Garvin, too—he might as well have been an unusually intelligent baboon.
* * *
Zero hour came and the Argosy lifted until Earth was a tremendous, curving ball below and the stars were brilliant points of light in a black sky. The Slug cruiser swung to intercept him within the first minute of flight but it seemed to move with unnatural slowness. It should have been driving in at full speed and it wasn't . . .
'Something's up,' Ground Control said. 'It's coming in too slowly.'
'I see that,' he answered. 'It must be covering something beyond it, in your radar shadow.' It was. When he was almost free of the last traces of atmosphere he saw the other cruiser, far out and hidden from Ground Control's radar by the radar shadow cast by the first one. He reported, giving its position and course as given him by the robot astrogating unit.
'We'll have the greatest amount of time if I make turn-over now and decelerate,' he finished. The voice of Harding came through the auxiliary speaker:
'Do so.'
The Argosy swung, end for end, and he decelerated. The cruiser behind him increased its speed, making certain it would be in position to cut off any return to Earth. The other cruiser altered its course to intersect the point in space the Argosy would soon occupy, and the Argosy was between the rapidly closing jaws of a trap.
He made reports to Ground Control at one-minute intervals. At 11:49 he said:
'Our velocity is approaching zero. We'll be within range of the second cruiser's blasters in two more minutes.'
Harding spoke again to him:
'We'll go into the warp now. Do not alter the deceleration or the course of the ship while we're in the warp.'
'I won't,' he said.
There was a faint mutter from the auxiliary speaker as Harding gave some instructions to Garvin. Engle took a last look at the viewscreen; at blue-green Earth looming large in the center, Orion and Sirius glittering above it and the sun burning bright and yellow on the right. It was a scene he had observed many times before, all very familiar and normal—
The chronometer touched 11:50 and normalcy vanished.
Earth and sun and stars fled away from him, altering in appearance as they went, shrinking, dwindling. The seas and continents of Earth erupted and shook and boiled before Earth faded and disappeared. The sun changed from yellow to green to blue, to a tiny point of bright violet light that raced away into the blackness filling the screen and faded and disappeared as Earth had done. Then the viewscreen was black, utterly, completely, dead black. And the communicator that had connected him with Ground Control was silent, without the faintest whisper of background sound or space static.
In the silence the voice of Harding as he spoke to Garvin came through the speaker; puzzled, incredulous, almost shocked:
'Our velocity couldn't have been that great—and the sun receded into the ultraviolet!' There was the quick sound of hurrying footsteps then the more distant sound of the computer's keys being operated at a high rate of speed. He wanted to ask what had gone wrong but he knew no one would answer him. And it would be a pointless question— it was obvious from Harding's tone that he did not know, either.
He had an unpleasant feeling that Man's first venture into another dimension had produced catastrophic results. What had caused sun and Earth to disappear so quickly—and what force had riven and disfigured Earth?
Then he realized the significance of Harding's statement about the sun receding into the ultraviolet. If the ship had been traveling at a high velocity away from the sun, the wave length of the sun's light would have been increased in proportion to the speed of the ship. The sun should have disappeared in the long-wave infrared end of the spectrum, not the short-wave ultraviolet. With the thought came the explanation of the way the continents and oceans of Earth had quivered and seethed. The shifting of the spectrum range had shortened normally visible rays into invisibly short ultraviolet radiations while at the same time formerly invisible long infrared radiations had been shortened into visible wave lengths. There had been a continuous displacement into and past the ultraviolet and each wave length would have reflected best from a different place—mountains, valleys, oceans, deserts, warm areas, cool areas—and the steady progression into the ultraviolet had revealed each area in quick succession and given the appearance of agitated movement.
So there was no catastrophe and everything had a logical explanation. Except how they could have been approaching a sun that he had seen clearly, visibly, racing away from them.
'Engle—' The voice of Harding came through the speaker. 'We're going back into normal space to make another
