The Black Star Passes by John W. Campbell (read e book .txt) 📕

walking down the first corridor, they came to a small room, whence issued the low hum of one of the motors. Entering, they found the crew sleeping, and the motor idling.

“Good Lord!” Wade exclaimed. “Look at that motor, Arcot! No bigger than the trunk of a man’s body. Yet a battery of these sends the ship along at a mile a second! What power!”

Slowly they proceeded down the long hall. At each of the fifty engine mountings they found the same conditions. At the end of the hall there was an escalator that led one level higher, into the upper wing. Here they found long rows of the bombing posts and the corresponding quartz rods.

They returned finally to the control room. Here Arcot spent a long time looking over the many instruments, the controls, and the piloting apparatus.

“Wade,” he said at last, “I think I can see how this is done. I am going to stop those engines, start them, then accelerate them till the ship rolls a bit!” Arcot stepped quickly over to the pilots seat, lifted the sleeping pilot out, and settled in his place.

“Now, you go over to that board there⁠—that one⁠—and when I ask you to, please turn on that control⁠—no, the one below⁠—yes⁠—turn it on about one notch at a time.”

Wade shook his head dubiously, a one-sided grin on his face. “All right, Arcot⁠—just as you say⁠—but when I think of the powers you’re playing with⁠—well, a mistake might be unhealthy!”

“I’m going to stop the motors now,” Arcot announced quietly. All the time they had been on board, they had been aware of the barely inaudible whine of the motors. Now suddenly, it was gone, and the plane was still as death!

Arcot’s voice sounded unnaturally loud. “I did it without blowing the ship up after all! Now we’re going to try turning the power on!”

Suddenly there was a throaty hum; then quickly it became the low whine; then, as Arcot turned on the throttle before him, he heard the tens of thousands of horsepower spring into life⁠—and suddenly the whine was a low roar⁠—the mighty propellers out there had became a blur⁠—then with majestic slowness the huge machine moved off across the field!

Arcot shut off the motors and rose with a broad, relieved smile, “Easy!” he said. They made their way again up through the ship, up through the room of the tremendous cylinder coil, and then into the power room. Now the machines were quiet, for the motors were no longer working.

“Arcot, you didn’t shut off the biggest machine of all down there. How come?”

“I couldn’t, Wade. It has no shut-off control, and if it did have, I wouldn’t use it. I will tell you why when we get back to the Solarite.”

At last they left the mighty machine; walked once more across its broad metal top. Here and there they now saw the ends of those quartz cylinders. Once more they entered the Solarite, through the air lock, and took off the cumbersome insulating suits.

As quickly as possible Arcot outlined to the two who had stayed with the Solarite, the things they had seen, and the layout of the great ship.

“I think I can understand the secret of all that power, and it’s not so different from the Solarite, at that. It, too, draws its power from the sun, though in a different way, and it stores it within itself, which the Solarite does not try to do.

“Light of course, is energy, and therefore, has mass. It exerts pressure, the impact of its moving units of energy⁠—photons. We have electrons and protons of matter, and photons of light. Now we know that the mass of protons and electrons will attract other protons and electrons, and hold them near⁠—as in a stone, or in a solar system. The new idea here is that the photons will attract each other ever more and more powerfully, the closer they get. The Kaxorians have developed a method of getting them so close together, that they will, for a while at least, hold themselves there, and with a little ‘pressure,’ will stay there indefinitely.

“In that huge coil and cylinder we found there we saw the main power storage tank. That was full of gaseous light-energy held together by its own attraction, plus a little help of the generator!”

“A little help?” Wade exclaimed. “Quite a little! I’ll bet that thing had a million horsepower in its motor!”

“Yes⁠—but I’ll bet they have nearly fifty pounds of light condensed there⁠—so why worry about a little thing like a million horsepower? They have plenty more where that comes from.

“I think they go up above the clouds in some way and collect the sun’s energy. Remember that Venus gets twice as much as Earth. They focus it on those tubes on the roof there, and they, like all quartz tubes, conduct the light down into the condensers where it is first collected. Then it is led to the big condenser downstairs, where the final power is added, and the condensed light is stored.

“Quartz conducts light just as copper conducts electricity⁠—those are bus bars we saw running around there.

“The bombs we’ve been meeting recently are, of course, little knots of this light energy thrown out by that projector mechanism we saw. When they hit anything, the object absorbs their energy⁠—and is very promptly volatilized by the heat of the absorption.

“Do you remember that column of hissing radiance we saw shooting out of the wrecked plane just before it blew up? That was the motor connection, broken, and discharging free energy. That would ordinarily have supplied all fifty motors at about full speed. Naturally, when it cut loose, it was rather violent.

“The main generator had been damaged, no doubt, so it stopped working, and the gravitational attraction of the photons wasn’t enough, without its influence to hold them bound too long. All those floods of energy were released instantaneously, of course.

“Look⁠—there come the Lanorians now. I want to go back