Page:Weird Tales volume 36 number 01.djvu/18

32 unsteadiness a lurching halt of the ship. At that instant Todd spoke to Garrity; Garrity obeyed, and—

We were once again traveling smoothly on our proper course. But Jupiter—monstrous missile of solid, terrible death—was no longer before us! It was behind us!

saw that, Captain Hanson laughed aloud. And vast was the joy of that laughter. Relief, happiness, sheer triumph. And apology. And he cried:

"You've done it, son! Forgive me for doubting you. We're safe! I don't know how, but—come on in, boy, and tell us all about it!"

But there came no answer. Only the echo of our own harsh breathing, the dry scrape of our own feet shuffling restlessly. And new terror loomed suddenly in the Old Man's eyes.

"Biggs! he cried. "Lanse, my boy! Lanse!"

And then—

It was like the faintest, winnowed chaff of sound, breathing from far, far away. A voice speaking. To us. A voice that said:

"—can't come back…Skipper…Sparks will understand. Tell him…mass-energy…relationships. And tell…Diane…I love…"

That was all. And my brain reeled beneath the import of those fading words. Suddenly I knew! I didn't need to hear Cap Hanson screaming wild orders to the sailors to the aft deck below, nor to hear their answer.

"He's not here, sir. He cast off the auxiliary a moment or so ago."

I knew!

, I told them. My explanation was short, for the solution was simple. Simple, once you grant that a man possess infinite loyalty, infinite courage, in one lean and gangling frame.

"Biggs saw," I said, "that there was only one way to save us all from death. Oh, he bad blundered, yes, but we all blunder sometimes. But not all of us pay the penalty as willingly, as bravely, as he did.

"Jupiter was upon us. Within minutes we would have crashed into the greatest of the solar planets. Only Biggs saw a way out. And that was—to make the speed of our ship exactly approximate the speed of light at the moment of impact!"

Dick said. "But how—"

"He told us the answer. Mass-energy relationships. You know the fundamental theory of the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction. Objects moving in space are contracted along their major axis in dire proportion to their speed, with the limiting velocity, the speed of light, as their ultimate limit. In other words, at the precise speed of light, this ship existed in only a unilateral dimension!"

Hanson said, "You mean we—hurled over Jupiter?"

"No, sir. We went right through it! At that tremendous speed, our dimension-extension was zero. Hence it did not affect, nor was it affected in any way by, the bulk and mass of Jupiter.

"It's as though an exceedingly fine wire, moving at lightning speed, were to be propelled through a cake of ice. Only in our case, the 'wire' was of zero dimension, and the cake of ice—Jupiter—did not even recognize that it had been penetrated.

"But—" I shook, my head. "But Mr. Biggs realized what this daring scheme meant. It meant that in addition to our size being reduced to the infinitesimal, our mass would be raised to the infinite—for that is the corollary of the contraction theory.

"There had to be some way of getting us back to our normal shape and size. The only possible method was by the forcible alteration of our mass. And—Biggs adopted this method. He placed himself in the life-skiff, gave the necessary orders