Einstein's Planetoid
Nick Hartnett captains the starship Columbia on a mission to reach Alpha Centauri, retracing the path of his father Steve Hartnett's lost expedition aboard the Orion. Powered by his father's mysterious "contracel" technology—a counter-acceleration device whose underlying principles even Nick doesn't fully understand—the Columbia carries a crew of family and friends of the original explorers, including Nick's fiancée Dorothy Gilbert, whose brother Harry was aboard the Orion, plus Bob and Edgar Vickers, Fred Marquis, and Joe Timbie. En route, the crew intercepts garbled distress signals on "wave n," the private communication frequency Steve Hartnett once used. Radio operator Joe Timbie notices the transmissions play correctly only when reversed, like backward-recorded music. Edgar Vickers, obsessively decoding the signals, eventually goes half-mad from the effort but manages to calculate the signal's source: a tiny, impossibly dense planetoid in tight orbit around Proxima Centauri, spinning at an extraordinary 100 rotations per minute. Its rapid spin makes it appear as a perfect sphere from a distance, though it is actually irregular. Marquis nicknames it Hastur. Landing proves difficult—the ship's first two approaches cause it to bounce off the planetoid's superheated, rapidly rotating atmosphere—until Edgar suggests landing at the pole, which works. On the surface, the crew treks across Hastur's uneven, radiation-soaked terrain (gravity 125% of Earth's) and eventually locates the wrecked Orion. Inside, they find Steve Hartnett alive but aged and alone, having survived for years by writing a satirical travel book and rationing supplies. Steve recounts the Orion's fate: the ship's contracel drive was disabled after high-velocity travel warped its fourth-dimensional fields, stranding them on Hastur. A ruptured fuel tank threatened to destroy the ship, and several crew members sacrificed themselves sealing off the leak while others died from the planetoid's radiation after venturing outside without full suits. Twelve people, including Dorothy's brother Harry, perished. Steve alone remained, subsisting and documenting the planetoid's strange phenomena while unable to escape—his ship's manual controls too heavy for one man to operate. The Columbia crew faces the same problem: their rockets alone aren't powerful enough to break free of Hastur's gravity, and the contracel field is useless on the surface. Edgar theorizes that Hastur's near-light-speed equatorial rotation causes a Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction, making the equator's circumference shrink even as its diameter stays constant—suggesting mass increases catastrophically near the equator. Dorothy reasons that the crew shouldn't aim for the equator itself but for an intermediate point where centrifugal force could fling the ship free before relativistic mass gain becomes prohibitive. The crew straps in and fires the rockets in a punishing, jolting run across Hastur's surface toward that point. As they accelerate, they witness a series of bizarre, terrifying visions: monstrous glowing shapes, an apparent meteor impact that reshapes the landscape, and a battle between grotesque creatures—a three-armed, single-eyed "cone-creature" that traps and poisons a giant drifting "cloud-thing" after being swallowed by it. Steve explains that these visions are optical distortions caused by relativistic effects: the "monsters" are actually microscopic organisms, magnified and warped by the same forces distorting time and space around the speeding ship. At the critical point, the ship is buffeted by a violent impact and breaks free of Hastur's gravity, achieving escape. Safe at last, the survivors reflect on Hastur's unsolved mysteries—its structural cohesion despite extreme rotation, the reversed radio signals—which Steve admits his in-universe "travel book" deliberately fails to explain seriously, being a parody of pompous exploration literature rather than a scientific account. The story closes with the Columbia turning back toward Earth (having abandoned or postponed its original Centauri goal), Dorothy mourning her brother, and she and Nick contemplating their future together, including a hoped-for child.
By C.M. Kornbluth · First published 1942 · Genre: Science Fiction, Hard Science Fiction, Space Opera · 4 chapters
Contents
- Heirs of Space Flight
- Incredible World
- Menace Unseen
- Ordeal