Spacehounds of IPC

by E. E. Smith

"You sound lucid. Is there any possibility of getting back, though, if we got anywhere near Jupiter? It's so far away!"

"It's a long stretch from Jupiter to any of the planets where we have power-plants, all right—particularly now, when Mars and Tellus are subtending an angle of something more than ninety degrees at the sun, and Venus is between the two, while Jupiter is clear across the sun from all three of them. Even when Jupiter is in mean opposition to Mars, it is still some five hundred and fifty million kilometers away, so you can form some idea as to how far it is from our nearest planet now. No, if we expect to get back under our own power, we've got to break away pretty quick—these lifeboats have very little accumulator capacity, and the receptors are useless above about three hundred million kilometers...."

"But it'll take us a long time to go that far, won't it?"

"Not very. Our own ships, using only the acceleration of gravity, and both plus and minus at that, make the better than four hundred million kilometers of the long route to Mars in five days. These birds are using almost that much acceleration, and I don't see how they do it. They must have a tractor ray. Brandon claimed that such a thing was theoretically possible, but Westfall and I couldn't see it. We ragged him about it a lot—and he was right. I thought, of course, they'd drift with us, but they are using power steadily. They've got some system!"

"Suppose they could be using intra-atomic energy? We were taught that it was impossible, but you've shattered a lot of my knowledge today."

"I wouldn't want to say definitely that it is absolutely impossible, but the deeper we go into that line, the more unlikely intra-atomic energy power-plants become. No, they've got a real power-transmission system—one that can hold a tight beam together a lot farther than anything we have been able to develop, that's all. Well, we've given them quite a lot of time to get over any suspicion of us, let's see if we can sneak away from them."

By short and infrequent applications of power to the dirigible projectors of the life-boat, Stevens slowly shifted the position of the fragment which bore their craft until it was well clear of the other components of the mass of wreckage. He then exerted a very small retarding force, so that their bit would lag behind the procession, as though it had accidently been separated. But the crew of the captor was alert, and no sooner did a clear space show itself between them and the mass than a ray picked them up and herded them back into place. Stevens then nudged other pieces so that they fell out, only to see them also rounded up. Hour after hour he kept trying—doing nothing sufficiently energetic to create any suspicion, but attempting everything he could think of that offered any chance of escape from the clutches of their captors. Immovable at the plate, his hands upon the controls, he performed every insidious maneuver his agile brain could devise, but he could not succeed in separating their vehicle from its fellows. Finally, after a last attempt, which was foiled as easily as were its predecessors, he shut off his controls and turned to his companion with a grin.

"I didn't think I could get away with it—they're keen, that gang—but I had to keep at it as long as it would have done us any good."

"Wouldn't it do us any good now?"

"Not a bit—we're going so fast that we couldn't stop—we're out of even radio range of our closest power-plant. We'll have to put off any more attempts until they slow us down. They're fairly close to at least one of the moons of Jupiter, we'll have our best chance—so good, in fact, that I really think we can make it."