Astounding British Edition, Vol. 6, No. 8 — page 16: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

14 ticles! T'll be at your place in the morning with my case packed for a six months’ trip. Now I'm getting a whole case of feminine curiosity!” : 3 “Yes?” he said cheerfully. “What, this time?” “Well, if your informant was tossing us an experiment, hoping to get an answer, then why did mine warn me? They’ll never see a spaceship burst at a distance of a half dozen light-years, They might never really know.” “We'll find out,” he said firmly. “There ae aie about both sides that I do not 1 e ” True to her word, Edith Ward turned up at the first glimmer of daylight with her case of personal belongings. “Where’ll I have it put?” she asked. “Ship Two, Stateroom Three,” he said. “L_have two crates fixed up so that if you’re right, we can still get home without taking to the lifecraft.” One hour later, the two ships lifted on their ordinary space drive and sped with constant acceleration directly away from the stn. At three times gravity they went, and as the seconds and the minutes and the hours passed, their velocity mounted up- ward. In both ships, the men worked quietly on their instruments, loafed noisily, and generally killed time. Everything had been triply checked by the time that turnover came, six days after the start. Then for six more days the ships decelerated at three gravities while the sun dwindled in size. Between Tom Barden and Edith Ward there was much talk, but no solution to the . problem. They covered nearly all aspects of the possibilities and came up with the same result: Insufficient evidence to support any postulate. About the only thing that came to com- plete agreement was the statement that there was more to this than was clear, and it was suspicious. The feud that had existed faded away. It may have been the common interest, or if you will, the common menace. For though no true menace had shown, it was a common: bond between Barden and Ward against a question that annoyed them simultaneously. It may have been simply the fact that man and woman find it hard to continue a dislike when they have something in common. Nature seems to have made it so. It may have been the thrill of adventure, prosaic as it was to be racing through unchangeable space for hour upon hour and day upon day with nothing but the sheerest of bore- dom outside of the ship. Perhaps it might have been that the sight out of any window was exactly the same today as it was yester- day and would be tomorrow or a hundred years from now—or even a thousand, for though the stars do move in their separate paths, the constellations are not materially ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION different. The utter consiancy of the sky without may have turned them inward to seek the changing play of personality. Regardless of the reason, by the time they reached that unmarked spot outside of the orbit of Pluto where the ships became close to. motionless with respect to Sol—there was no way of telling true zero-relative motion and true zero was not important anyway—they were friends. : The ships were rather closer together than they’d anticipated, and it took only a couple of hours of juggling to bring them together. Then the skeleton crew of the one was transferred to the other ship. It drew away —and away and away. “We've got more radio equipment aboard these crates than the Interplanetary Network owns,” grinned Barden. “Everything on the darned crate is controlled and every meter, instrument, and dingbat aboard her will ship the answer back here. There must be a million radio-controlled synchros aboard these ships, and cameras on both to read every factor.” “That's fine,” answered Edith with a smile. “What happens if it works like a charm and takes off at superspeed? How do your radio-controlled gadgets work then?” “We'd lose the ship, of course, if we didn’t have a time clock on the drive. If all goes well, the first drive will. run for exactly ten seconds. Then we'll have about a ten-day flight to find it again because it will be a long way from here—straight out!” He smiled. “Of course, if we want to take a small chance, we could turn it on its own primary drive and superspeed it back if all goes well. But the radio controls will be as sluggish as the devil because there should be about a three or four hour transmission delay.” The other ship was a minute speck in the distance. Then a ship-alarm rang and the entire crew came to the alert. Barden said: “This is it!” in a strained voice and he pulled the big switch. ; Along the wall was the bank upon bank of synchrometers, reading every possible factor in the controlled ship. Before the panel were trained technicians, each with a desk full of controls. Behind them were the directors with the master controls, and behind them stood Barden and Edith Ward. From holes above peeked the lenses of cameras recording the motions of every technician, and behind the entire group, more cameras pointed at the vast -master panel. The recorders took down every sound, and the entire proceeding was syn- chronized by crystal-controlled clocks run- ning from a primary standard of frequency. At the starting impulse, the warm-up time pilot lit and the relays clicked as one, like a single, sharp chord of music. When the “eC DOO KS sO) im SS