upon all sides, above and below. Still unable to believe what she saw, she mounted to the conning tower on the vessel’s roof and examined the abysmal depths of space through the instruments. Every reading brought home the staggering truth to her.
She was well outside the solar system! Acceleration unchecked, the Ultra had reached an incredible velocity before the fuel had been exhausted—only a fraction beneath the speed of light, the fastest speed possible within the normal universe.
She was lost! For the first time in her career she was abroad in space without the least conception of where she was.
The speed was still being maintained at a constant velocity because there was nothing to check it. She was flying blindly onward into the unknown.
“And no fuel,” she finished, looking about her helplessly. “I’m sure Abna would be glad to know how completely his plot worked.”
To admit defeat was not the Amazon’s way. She took the situation in hand and first revived herself with a meal and essences: then she concentrated on the problem.
Spare copper blocks she had none. To use the rockets to slow down her acceleration was feasible, but they could not last very long. The atomic dust explosive they used was only sufficient for a normal round-the-System hop.
An hour of solid thinking still left her no wiser than at first. The problem seemed to be insurmountable. Yet if it were not solved, the Ultra would continue hurtling onward through free space until it came within range of some heavy body; then it would immediately be drawn to it. This thought decided the Amazon against using the rockets in a futile effort to check her speed. She might need them yet to resist the pull of some alien gravity field.
At last she got up from her chair and went to the window, looking again on the incomprehensible void. She had never been frightened of it before, as long as she was within measurable limits of home—but here, billions of miles from all she had ever known, she found herself battling a rising tide of terror.
A sudden movement in the Ultra made her look about her sharply. She was conscious of it by the pressure against her feet. The giant machine was turning slowly. Through the window she saw the endless stars changing position. Her speed had not decreased, but direction had certainly changed and she could see no reason for it. The only answer could be that she had fallen into the attraction of an as yet invisible body.
Hurrying over to the control board, she set the instruments in action. The super-radar beam she projected gave back an answer. Tens of millions of miles ahead of her was a small but immensely heavy planetoid, uncharted, unknown as far as she was concerned, and towards it the Ultra was hurtling. There could only be one result when she struck that body. Vessel and planetoid would fuse into one, welded by the inconceivable force of the concussion.
Instantly she gave power to the forward rockets. By blasting toward the body with every vestige of force, it was possible that she might slow down her terrific speed—but even at that she could see no possible way to escape being disintegrated when the crash came.
With the knowledge that she had done all she could she remained at the controls, staring intently into the jet of space. Certainly her near-light speed was rapidly slowing. Slower, and slower still. Then she glimpsed the cause of her troubles ahead. It was a small planetoid, perhaps the size of Ceres, but with a strong gravity due to dense material.
The Ultra struck the planetoid. Then all sense of strain was gone. There was no shock, no jarring. And yet the Ultra was motionless, its titanic speed gone. The whole business was at variance with science.
She looked outside. The sun was a mere pinpoint of light, but the radiance of the Milky Way and distant nebulae was sufficient to show a perfectly level landscape, which looked like sponge-rubber. No hills, no dales, no vegetation, no clouds. It suggested there was no air—that this was some lifeless planetoid that lay far beyond her own solar system, but had been torn away from some other stellar system perhaps thousands of years ago, and was now a wanderer in the gulfs of interstellar space, far beyond the ordinary ken of intelligent beings.
Slowly the Amazon moved, utterly baffled to find herself still alive. Switching on the external gauges, she read them carefully. Her guess was right: there was no air, and the temperature reading was below zero. No place to venture—yet if she did not—?
She had scrambled into a spacesuit, snapped the transparent helmet in position, and with her weapon-belt well loaded, tugged open the airlock.
Gravity pulled her down the moment she stepped outside. It dragged her flat on her face. She rose only at the cost of vast physical strain. The amazing ground dented at every step she took and then sprang back into place with the resiliency of rubber. With her knife she hacked a sample of it for examination and put it in her specimen-bag.
The place affected her brain in the most incredible fashion. Each thought she had seemed to echo, setting her head jangling unbearably. She thought of Earth and home, and immediately the conception was slammed back at her with such intensity it swamped every other idea in her mind. Since she could not exist without thinking, it meant that every notion that came into her brain was reflected back to its source until she felt she would go crazy. Dazed, her head ringing, she clawed her way back into the Ultra and slammed the door. The queer mental ‘echo’ effect ceased immediately.
Here was a mystery of immense proportions, even to so skilled a scientist as was the Amazon. She spent a few moments recovering her balance after she had clambered from the spacesuit; then, since the answer seemed to lie in the planetoid’s peculiar constitution, she set to work on an analysis of the sample she had brought with her. It explained much, if not everything.
The specimen was tissue and mineral in about equal proportions, just as a human bone is hard on the exterior with marrow and pulp within. Incredible though the Amazon found the fact, there was no doubt that, in a dim kind of way, the planet was a living thing. One titanic nerve-centre, but of such a low order of intelligence it had not the power of thought, only the power of reflecting them if they came from an outside source.
“Which accounts for my own thoughts being flung back at me,” the Amazon mused. “This tissue-mineral reflects thoughts as a mirror reflects light-waves. It is vastly resilient, which is why when the Ultra struck it at incredible speed it absorbed the impact.”
Then she remembered something. Once, when she had been with Abna, they had been being flung into space by a force beam generated by Quorne. He had solved the problem by his knowledge of the fourth dimension, in which space itself could be foreshortened to zero. The Amazon, in her recent troubled state of mind, had forgotten that she had learned every secret Abna possessed.
Setting the computers to work to check her equations, she arrived at the answer by one of the most complicated feats of mathematics she had ever attempted. Four-dimensional geometry was something new to her. She no longer wondered why Abna had wanted to keep it a secret: it unlocked the door to a thousand mysteries of space and time.
Theoretically, she knew now how to bridge the inconceivable gulf of space between herself and the distant solar system using only the minimal amount of ordinary rocket fuel that remained. Once she had done that she could radio to Earth or Mars for more supplies of copper, and so reach home—but first there was the practical problem of converting her existing power-plant into a four-dimensional one. Then she would need just enough power to give a ten-second burst of furious energy. That energy must envelop the Ultra and isolate it for a few brief seconds from the space in which it stood. Immediately before that happened she would fire the ordinary rockets to build up as much speed as she could, headed in the direction of Earth. After that, four-dimensional science should cause space to move around the Ultra
