Beyond the Stars by Ray Cummings

Then the vehicle cooled rapidly. Soon we had the heaters going. The coldness of space enveloped us penetrating the vehicle's walls. But with the heaters we managed to be comfortable.

Dr. Weatherby sat at the instrument table. His chronometer there showed 5 A. M. We had started at 4 A. M. On one of the distant dials the miles were registering in units of a thousand. The dial-pointer was nearing XX6. Six thousand miles:

Dr. Weatherby glanced up as I appeared. Alice and Dolores, and Jim with them, had gone astern to prepare a broth. We were all of us still feeling a bit shaky, though the sense of lightness had worn off.

Dr. Weatherby had a chart on the table. It showed our solar system. The sun was at its center, and the planetary orbits in concentric circles around it. The planets and our own moon and a few of the larger comets and asteroids were all shown, their positions given progressively for each hour beginning at our starting time.

"I'm heading this way, Leonard. Holding the general plane in which the planets lie. " His finger traced a line from the earth, past the moon, past Mars. Jupiter and Saturn lay over to one side, and Neptune to the other. Uranus was far on the opposite side, beyond the sun.

Dr. Weatherby added, "The moon is drawing us now. But I shall shortly turn a neutral side toward it, and Mars will draw us. We are more than a freely falling body. We are being pulled downward."

I sat beside him. "What is our velocity now?"

He gestured toward a dial, an ingenious affair. He had already explained its workings, the lessening rate of the earth's gravitational pull shown by a hair-spring balance as a figure on the dial.

"Three thousand miles an hour, Leonard. " But as I watched, the figure moved to 4; and then to 5, 6 and 7.

The moon, nearly full, lay below us, ahead of us, white, glittering and cold, with the black firmament and the stars clustering about it. We were falling bow down. Overhead, above our blunt stern, the giant crescent earth hung across the firmament. It was still dull red; its configurations of land and water were plainly visible. A silver sunlight edged it.

"Ah, the sun, Leonard! " Abruptly we had emerged from the earth's conical shadow into the sunlight. But the heavens remained black. The stars blazed with a cold, white gleam as before. And behind us was the white sun with its corona of flame leaping from it.

I have said we were falling-our projectile falling bow down, like a plummet. Gazing through the window it seemed so. But the effect was psychological. I could as readily picture us on a level, proceeding onward.

It was as though we were poised within a giant hollow globe of black glass, star encrusted. There could be no standards of up, or down; it was all as the mind chanced to conceive it. But within the vehicle itself, its soundless, vibrationless, level floor beneath our feet, a complete sense of normality remained.

"Dr. Weatherby," I said, "that model. you remember, it grew gigantic. But we. we're still the same size at which we started?"

For an hour past, a thousand questions had been seething in my mind. This navigation of space was clear enough. All my life scientists had been discussing it. We were moving now at a velocity of some twelve thousand miles an hour. But what was that? Less than the crawling of an ant using the equator of the earth as a race track! Twelve thousand miles an hour-or twelve billion-would get us nowhere among the distant stars in a lifetime!

Dr. Weatherby answered my spoken question: "We are only very little larger than when we started, Leonard. An infinitesimal fraction, for our velocity is nothing as yet. I'll use the Elton Beta ray once we get farther out."

He turned to his switches. Through the window I saw the firmament swing slightly. He was navigating, heading for some distant realm beyond all the stars that we could see, all the stars that could exist out there. This tiny vehicle, threading its way. How did he, how could he possibly know his way?

I asked him bluntly, and he looked up from his chart with a smile. "Leonard, in five minutes I could tell you every remaining fundamental of the laws which are governing us. I will tell you, but I want Jim to hear it too. And I'm absorbed now in getting out past the asteroids. A little later, I'll make it clear."

We dropped past the moon at a distance of perhaps a hundred thousand miles. We were then some two hundred and forty thousand miles from earth. It was nearly noon, with the earth standard time of Dr. Weatherby's home. We had been traveling eight hours; constantly accelerating, our velocity at noon had reached a thousand miles a minute.

The moon, as we passed it, floated upward with a quite visible movement. It was a magnificent sight, though the smallest of telescopes on earth brought it visually nearer than it was now.