The Star Lord, Boyd Ellanby [the false prince series txt] 📗

A final bell rang, a final light flashed.

On the floor below the ship, the crowds of relatives and wistful stay-at-homes gazed up; at the beautiful metal creation, poised on its slender fins, nose pointed towards the opened dome.

A vibration began, a gentle, barely perceptible shuddering of the ground which increased in frequency. It beat through the floor, into their feet, until their whole bodies quivered with the racing pulse that grew faster, faster, as the twenty-four total conversion Piles in the ship released their power. Then, as the people watched, between one instant and the next, the ship van[Pg 18]ished. In the blink of an eyelid she had shifted to hyperspace.

The Star Lord had begun her maiden voyage.

*       *       *

By the second day out, most of the passengers felt completely at home. The ship had become a separate world, and the routines they had left behind them on earth, and the various routines they would take up again some six weeks from now on Almazin III seemed equally remote and improbable. Life on the Star Lord was the only reality.

She moved through the uncharted realms of hyperspace, travelling in one hour's time as measured by earth watches, more than twenty light years distance, if measured in the units of real space. The ship itself was quiet. The vibration of the takeoff had ended in a moment, and now the passengers could hear no noise and hum of motors, could feel no motion against swelling waves, no battering against a barrier of uneven air. The artificial gravity induced a sense of security as absolute as though the ship were resting on living rock.

Although most of the cabins were small, they were cleverly designed to provide the maximum of comfort, even the least expensive of them. For the very wealthy, the rulers of the galaxy's finance, the owners of the galaxy's industries, the makers of the galaxy's entertainment, there were the luxury cabins. The floors glowed with the soft reds of oriental rugs, the lounge chairs were upholstered in fabrics gleaming with gold thread. Cream-colored satin curtains fluttered in an artificial breeze at the simulated windows, and on the walls hung tranquil landscapes in dull gold frames. To those who had engaged them, the ornate cabins seemed only appropriate to their own eminent positions in life.

Delicious meals were served three times a day in the several dining rooms, the softly lighted Bar was never closed, and every day three theaters offered a varied program of stereo-dramas. There was even—the most marvelous, daring, expensive luxury of all—a swimming pool. The pool was small, and was open only to the first cabin passengers, but the fact that a ship travelling to a distant solar system could afford room enough for a pool, and extra weight for the water needed to fill it, seemed evidence that man had achieved a complete conquest of the inconveniences of space travel.

One luxury, however, freely accessible to even the poorest sheep herder on earth, was denied the passengers of the Star Lord.

They could not see the stars. They could not see the sky.

The ship had portholes, of[Pg 19] course, and observation rooms which could be opened if at any time she cruised in normal space, but the ports and observation windows were closed now, for there was nothing to see. The ship was surrounded by blackness, the impenetrable, unknowable blackness, of hyperspace, but this black emptiness did not frighten the passengers because they never bothered to think about it.

But the builders of the ship had designed it so that even the simple pleasure of looking at a friendly sky should not be denied its passengers. An artificial day and night of the appropriate length was maintained by the dimming and brightening of lights, and the main lounges were bounded with special walls which looked like windows, through which could be glimpsed bright summer days, fleecy clouds drifting over a blue sky, and, in the evenings, soft starlight.

Every passenger should have been soothed into contentment by these devices, but by the end of the first week, Burl Jasperson was restless.

He hated to sit still, and the hours and the days seemed endless. His bald head and portly body were a familiar sight as he roamed the ship, inspecting every detail as though it were his personal responsibility. Once a day he called on Captain Evans to check on the progress of the Star Lord, once a day he chafed under the cold courtesy of the Captain's manner, and then wandered on. In his jacket he wore his pocket recorder, and he was momentarily cheered whenever he found an excuse for making a memorandum:

"Chairs in lounge should be two centimeters lower. Sell Deutonium shares. How about monogrammed linens for the first cabins? Install gymnasium?"

As he walked, he murmured these thoughts to his recorder, and each night his meek and colorless secretary sat up late to transcribe them into the locked notebook which was his special charge, after Jasperson had taken his sleeping pills and crawled into bed.

On the evening of the eighth night out, Burl Jasperson wandered into the Bar, and drummed his pudgy fingers on the table as he waited to give his order.

"A glass of ice water, and a Moon Fizz. And be sure you make it with genuine absinthe. You fellows seem to think you can get away with making it with 'arak, and your customers won't know the difference. Well, just remember I'm one customer that does, and I want real absinthe."

"Yes, sir, Mr. Jasperson," said the Bar steward.[Pg 20]

Turning restlessly in his chair, Burl let his eyes stop on the white-haired old gentleman beside him, happily consuming a brandy and soda. After a moment's inspection, he stuck out his hand confidently.

"My name's Jasperson. Everything all right? Enjoying the trip?"

The pink skin wrinkled in amusement.

"I am Wilson Larrabee. Everything's fine, thank you, except that the ship is almost too luxurious for a man of my background. A professor's salary does not often permit him indulgences of this kind."

"You a professor? Of what?"

"Various things at various times. Philosophy, physics, Elizabethan drama, history of science—"

"Myself, I never could understand why a sensible man would go into that business. No money. No prestige. Never doing anything, just reading and thinking."

"Every man to his taste," said Larrabee.

"Yes, within limits. But the things some of you professors think up! Most of the ideas do more harm than good, scaring people to death, hurting business. You'd think they ought to have more sense of responsibility!"

He tasted his drink, then nodded knowingly at the bartender. "This is something like! Real absinthe."

Professor Larrabee studied his companion. "I can hardly suppose, Mr. Jasperson, that you hold professors responsible for all the ills of the world. And yet you seem disturbed. Did you have something in particular in mind?"

"Yes. The Thakura Ripples!"

Amusement vanished from the professor's eyes. "What about them?"

"Why are people so afraid of them? As far as I can see, they're just a piece of nonsense thought up by a dreamy-eyed physics professor, and he hypnotized people into believing in them. But as I was telling Captain Evans last night, they've never been seen, never been measured, and there's nothing at all to prove that they have any existence outside the mind of a madman. And yet people are afraid of them!"

"And just what are the Thakura Ripples?" said Alan Chase, drawing up a chair. "Waiter, I'll have a spacecap."

"Feeling a little better tonight, Alan?" asked his friend.

"Some, thanks. I just had a checkup from Dr. Willoughby, and he thinks I'm more than holding my own. Now go on about the Ripples. Where are they? What do they do?"

"Suit yourself," Jasperson muttered. "If you want to tell ghost stories, go ahead."

"Thank you. The Thakura Rip[Pg 21]ples, my boy, are an unexplained phenomenon of hyperspace. We do not know what they are—only that they are dangerous."

"But I thought that space was entirely uniform?"

"Alas, no. Not even normal space can be called uniform. It has been known for a long time that variations exist in the density of the interstellar gases. Just why they occur, what pattern they follow, if any, was for many years one of the major unsolved problems confronting astronomers and physicists. Then they learned that these variations in density of the interstellar gases were directly connected with the development of the successive ice ages on the earth, and eventually a study of the collisions and interactions of the various light forces from the stars in the galaxy made the pattern clear. We know, now, that the variations occur only in a certain band of space. They may occur at any given place within that band, but their position is constantly shifting and unpredictable."

"Now you see it, now you don't?" said Alan.

"Exactly. Now it was Thakura's theory that the Ripples are an analogous band of mysterious forces existing in hyperspace. They may be tangible barriers, they may be force barriers, we do not know. But a ship entering this lane may go through it without damage, and by pure chance take a course which misses all these bumps in space. Or, by going slowly and using his instruments to feel his way, a navigator can often sense them ahead, and if he is skillful he may be able to dodge them. But if, in some terrible moment, he smashes head-on against the Thakura Ripples, the conversion Piles which power his ship are immediately affected. They begin to heat, perhaps to heat irreversibly, and if they get out of control, they may vaporize. In the last fifty years at least five ships have vanished in this region, and it was Thakura's belief that they were disintegrated on the Ripples."

"But there isn't any evidence!" Jasperson exploded.

"Isn't a demolished space ship evidence?"

"No! It's evidence that something went wrong, certainly, but it doesn't tell us what went wrong. I'm not an unreasonable man, professor, I'm a hardheaded business man, and I like to deal with facts."

"I don't have an intimate knowledge of these matters, of course," said Larrabee, "but it was my impression that in the past fifty years since travel in hyperspace became common, several ships have been unaccountably lost."

"Your first figure was right. Five ships have been lost—that much is fact. Why they were lost is[Pg 22] still a question. It's my considered opinion that they were lost by human failure; the crewmen let the Piles get hot, and the ships were helpless. In the early days they had to get along with only one or two Piles, and if they went wrong the ship was done for. But we've changed all that. That's why the Star Lord has twenty-four Piles. No matter what happens it's impossible that all of them should go bad at once. She can ditch the dangerous Piles and still always have power enough left to make port. One thing is certain, this ship will never be wrecked on the Ripples of a mad scientist's imagination! A phenomenon like the Ripples, is impossible. If it existed, we'd have had some proof of it many years ago."

"But surely you don't mean to imply that if we don't know a fact, it is therefore impossible?"

"Not at all. But you know yourself, Professor Larrabee—you're an educated man—that by this time our physicists understand the universe completely, from A to Z. There are no unexplained phenomena. Thakura is shut up in a madhouse now. In my opinion, he was already insane when he published his theory."

Larrabee was nodding, thoughtfully. "I wonder what makes you so certain of your theory?"

"What theory? I never deal in theories. I'm talking fact."

"Your theory that we have unveiled all the mystery of the universe; how do you know? Every now and then, of course, man lives through a century of such amazing progress that he concludes that nothing remains to be learned. But how can he ever be certain?"

"But we are certain! Most physicists are in agreement now that there hasn't been one single unexplained physical aberration in the past century!"

"Most physicists except Thakura, you mean?"

"But Thakura is insane! We understand all the physical phenomena of the universe."

"Except the Thakura Ripples?"

Jasperson slammed down his glass and stood up, his face red and puffy. "Steward! More ice water! I'm getting tired of those words, professor. Do you think for one minute I'd have risked my life to come on this trip if I'd thought there was the slightest danger?"

Alan looked up languidly. "You mean you wouldn't mind sending a crew and passengers into danger—as long as you could take care to be safe yourself?"

"Surely you're not afraid, Mr. Jasperson?" said Larrabee.

"No. What is there to be afraid of?" He gulped down