Einstein's Planetoid

CHAPTER II INCREDIBLE WORLD

“HERE IT IS," exclaimed Dorothy wearily, planking down a sheaf of motors. "If you can follow through on this, Joe, we'll find the missing. We keep on straight ahead, at right angles to Earth's ecliptic." She closed her eyes. "Did you know,'' she murmured to no one in particular, "that Edgar's secret ambition is to purr like a cat?"

"How is he?" asked Nick anxiously.

"In a drunken stupor. After all he's been through I didn't have the heart to say no to him. So he emptied an almost full bottle of the rocket blast." She beamed at Nick. "Edgar has a special name for each grade of alcoholate we distill; this is the stiff one."

"We'll have to make some more of that," declared Marquis. "Heigh ho, it's back to the primitive. Y'know, scientists are pretty sure that savages spend most of their ingenuity in figuring out ways to make better and still better hooch. Disgusting, isn't it?"

"Hang on to your stanchions," yelled Timbie as he pressed a button which would send a warning signal throughout the ship, "we're accelerating." Instinctively they obeyed. Without the contracels, they would have been an obscene mass of mangled protoplasm in the seconds that followed; as it was, they experienced something like the feeling one obtains on the downward sweep of a stiff roller coaster.

"Keep a close check on the direction, Joe," grated Nick.

The impact of acceleration did not last long, but it was some five minutes before they really felt normal again. Timbie bent over calculations, a frown working its way across his forehead. "I don't like the way this is working out," he muttered.

"Following Edgar's equations?" asked Dorothy, picking up the sheet. She glanced over them quickly. "Nothing wrong here only—jeepers, you're right, Joe! Stop the bus, quick!"

"What's wrong?" demanded Nick.

"Nothing — except that we've passed them. They're behind us now!"

Timbie's hands flew over the controls rapidly. "Some day, after the contracel principle has really been perfected, we're going to have ships that are practically without inertia so long as the power's on. Ships that can stop dead like that without any terrifying results and go back the way they came as neat as the ancient's trains on their tracks. But we have to decelerate slowly or we're basket cases, if anybody ever finds us at all."

WHEREVER they are," mused Nick, "it's going to be one sweet job finding the planetoid in this space. It'll be practically invisible because of the distance from the sun. We may go by it a couple of times." He jabbed a call button sharply then spoke into a mike. "Grenville? What's doing? Oh, you are!" He turned to the others. "Our chemical engineer is turning his inventive genius to a superior blend of the rocket blast. How lovely."

"Noble pastime," put in Dorothy. "The last batch was pretty raw—I think it would have dissolved my teeth if I hadn't swallowed it quickly?”

"Listen," yelped Nick. "Lay off the monkey business for a minute and attend. Hop down to the observation room and look for a small planetoid—I don't know—could be any port. Use maximum magnification because it may be small—oh, big enough to hold a ship about this size perhaps. Possibly—quite probably dark. Signal us as soon as you see something."

"If he's been sampling his wares, he's likely to see anything," suggested Marquis.

"That being the case," replied Nick, "you'd better go down and help him, all of you. It's a tough job for one man in any condition."

"Coming?" inquired Marquis of Dorothy. She shook her head.

"Yaaah!" he jibed. "Captain's pet!"

DOROTHY bit her lip. "When I think that we almost went right by it without suspecting.... almost missed it completely, I mean."

Nick clasped her shoulder, his eyes fixed upon the almost invisible planetoid slowly growing before them. "Were you and your brother—very good friends?"

"I scarcely knew him," she murmured. "He ran away from home when I was seven or eight, and we only saw him once in awhile after that. I think it was nearly six years after he first hit out before he came back. He was mature then and I was just a silly adolescent, but I idolized him because he was so famous.

"He spent nearly a whole month with me—with us, that is—about four years before he signed up with your father. But all that seems unreal now. If he's—still alive, I'll probably say 'hello, Harry,' and kiss him with sisterly affection and be glad he's all right, but it won't really mean much. What about your father, Nick?"

He frowned. "Dad and I were pretty close. Matter of fact, I never called him 'dad' until after he disappeared. It was always Steve. He preferred that; didn't like his own name, though I didn't know about it for a long time.

"I never could figure out the relationships between the other kids I knew and their parents. I always felt sorry for them; you see, Steve explained to me once—it's amazing that I got it the first time—that 'father' or 'dad' or 'pop' was something I'd better call him when other people were around just for the sake of appearances. And, when I was in school, why he was 'my father.' But when we were alone together—or just the three of us, Steve, Mater, and I—we didn't have to be formal at all. We were always the best of friends."

She drew closer to him. "I'd like to meet—Steve."

He looked at her as if it were the first time they were meeting. "Steve would like you, too," he replied.

The alarm clanged for some time before they noticed it.

"Sorry!" exclaimed Timbie as he came into the room. "We've spotted it. It's less than 500 miles in diameter."

He eased himself into the control seat and started to shift them into the proper curve for landing. Fascinated, the three stared out the large port at the rapidly increasing globe before them. Unbroken in surface, it loomed before, a seemingly fantastic and impossible thing, a perfect sphere.

Slowly, prodigiously slow, they approached, coasting gracefully, for inertia or no, there was still the great mass of the ship to take into consideration. There was something wrong about this—somewhere—then, suddenly, the same thought struck all three of them.

"It isn't a sphere!" voiced Nick. "It just looks that way because of its tremendous speed of rotation!"

Dorothy wheeled out the z-special camera and turned on the power, let it operate for a full minute. Quietly they waited for the automatic developing process, then cut the lights and flashed a projection on the panel in the rear of the room which was ideally suitable for a motion-picture screen. Eyes glued on the meters, Dorothy adapted the flow of film until the images of the planetoid on the panel corresponded to what they saw outside.

"What's the period of rotation?"

"100 per minute. That, to put it mildly, is fast. It must be extremely dense to hang together at all—and even then, made of ultracohesive matter."

AS JOE put it some time later, the business of landing on Hastur (as the planetoid came to be known, Marquis first dubbed it that after some legendary, elemental wind- being; they found out later that Hastur wasn't really the being Fred had in mind, but it stuck nonetheless) was roughly analogous to that of a fly lighting on a spinning top. There was Hastur looming before them in the deeps of space, gleaming like phosphor on black velvet, the pseudosphere of it slowly swelling before their eyes. And there was the Columbia, a great overgrown cylinder with a turret in the middle—a turret that completely encircled her, because she spun, too,—albeit slowly in comparison to the planetoid—gently curving in to try to light upon the little world's surface.

What happened? They should have known, but they didn't. The Columbia swooped down upon Hastur, like the proverbial falcon upon its prey. Only it wasn't as simple as that, because the ship touched the outer fringe of that terrifically-accelerated rotating atmosphere and bounced off, ricocheted much like a smooth stone splatting across the surface of water.

They weren't ready for that splat. It took them unaware and tumbled them all head-over. Luck was with them and no one slammed into anything sharp or deadly hard. Dorothy nursed Nick's bloody nose and a cut over Marquis' eye which just missed being serious.

The second time they tried it, it was with less elan and more caution. They figured that if they could cut in at a point, cut in at an angle so close to zero that they were virtually parallel to it, slip in like a hypodermic with the grain, so to speak, they might be able to make it. It was a nice idea but it didn't work. They were knocked away again. Only this time all hands were prepared and no casualties followed.

At about then Edgar staggered in wanting to know what was. Briefly they told him. Edgar was amazed. He stood there gaping at them, at, he said, their innocence. Then he raised his hands. "Friends," quoth Edgar, "like little children shall I lead you. Land at the pole."

They made it.

“IT'S ODD, isn't it?" mused Dorothy as Nick helped her up an escarpment.

"What's odd?" Edgar wanted to know.

"That, despite the terrific rotation of Hastur, we just don't notice it now that we're here. I know why of course. Sheer relativity. But it's still odd, no matter how well you explain it."

"I know," mused Edgar. "The most common way is that of picturing a caterpillar crawling down the vane of a fan toward the center. The fan is rotating at terrific speed; the fan is on an express liner which is zipping through Earth's stratosphere like nobody's business; the stratosphere is following Earth's rotation, and so on. Yet our caterpillar isn't conscious of any motion save his own."

They stood silent for a moment, surveying the scene before them. Curving horizons could be seen on all sides, the uneven terrain before them now and then pierced by upcroppings of rock. Or perhaps metals. Above them no sky but space, dotted with luminaries. Far away a splotch of brightness—their sun. A world of twilight, this was.

Behind them lay their ship, a faintly gleaming cylinder, badly scraped and somewhat battered from landing. They'd prepared a sort of berth by splashing the terrain before them with blasts from the emergency rocket tubes, fore and aft, but the landing had still been rough, not the kind which would leave a ship in full dress paint.

Somewhere before them, precisely how far they could not know, was the lost Orion.

"I think," mused Nick, "that the reason for the odd feeling is that we are so vitally aware of the planet's rotation. After all, Earth is no laggard, either, but it's so damned big in comparison to this, and so few people, relatively have been off it as yet. What I mean is: if your knowledge of Hastur's rotation were strictly theoretical, or if you hadn't seen it from space, the whole thing wouldn't appear to you as it does now."

The going was just a trifle more difficult than covering rocky ground would have been on Earth; Vickers had figured Hastur's gravity as 125% that of Earth.

"Hold it," called out Edgar, punctuating the exclamation by easing himself onto the asteroid's surface. "Does anyone know where we're going?"

"We're off to find the Hartnetts," said Dorothy.

"How nice. And where, pray, may they be?"

"Right here—somewhere."

"Lovely," drawled Edgar, "just lovely. Have any of you stopped to consider how many days and how many weary miles you can cover on this not-as-small-as-it-looks world without finding anything at all except blisters?"

"We tried to contact them," cut in Nick, "but not a peep out of the radio at all. The thing just went dead."

"I'll have to admit," continued Edgar, "that at the very moment I can't think of any better procedure than just striking out in any direction at once. But I rest assured that there is a better way. Therefore, I move that we take it easy until we find one."

"We could use the ship," said Dorothy.

"Inadvisable," objected Nick. "Something tells me we are going to have trouble getting away from this little fiend of a planetoid."

"How about rocket cameras?" cut in Dorothy.

"Huh?"

"I can make them. We'll use just enough fuel to send them up half a mile or so. They'll take pictures, then glide down. We'll keep an eye on them and see where they land; Edgar will also take calculations while they're up—they'll be sort of periscopic photos. Of course we'll get our ship, but we may spot the other one."

Nick tapped the rocky surface pondering. "Only thing wrong with that is: why didn't we see the ship on the way down? We had a much bigger perspective."

"Perhaps too big. Besides we were too well occupied otherwise."

"Okay," sighed Nick. "I can't see any reason for not trying it."