There was one last period of final check-outs. Then Ato gave the signal, standing lean and tall in the control room, with a tight belt about his narrow waist, and Wolden’s slug-horn fastened securely to it.
The Nebula leaped toward the star-studded skies.
Odin watched the moon disappear below them. Mars with its canals and mossy deserts loomed ahead—swerved aside, and was behind them, Jupiter with its red clouds and its protean “eye” reached out for them and was left behind. The planets became smaller. They winked at them and cheered them on with a far halloo. Then Pluto loomed ahead, lost and forgotten up there in the night. And to Odin’s surprise, one last tiny planet, frozen to the color of a moonstone, looked at them like a dead thing that could not even remember life—and asked them what they were—and wearily bade them goodbye.
When the planets were no more than seed-pearls floating in the vast behind them, Ato gave the signal for all to make ready. There was a scurrying aboard ship for couches and over-stuffed chairs. And after the warning bell had ceased clanging, Ato muttered to Odin and Gunnar: “This has been tested enough. It ought to work.”
With one last shrug of his lean shoulders, Ato pulled the lever that threw them into the Fourth Drive.
The stars and the planets became streamers of light. They burst like sky-rockets and a million sparks fell into the void. The sparks winked out and the ship hurtled on through a darkness that seemed to take form before them. It was as though they burrowed through swathes of black cotton.
Once before, Jack Odin had experienced a feeling akin to this. It was the time when he had used Ato’s belt, and Gunnar had flung him into space as though he had been a minnow at the end of a snapping line. But that experience had been momentary. This built itself up—until Odin felt himself expanding and contracting at each pulse beat. His heart seemed to beat slower and slower. Waves of smothering pain struck him when they passed the speed of light. Then the pain diminished. He gasped for air, and it seemed to take years to reach his chest. The pain and the feeling of speed went slowly away. They were merely drifting now, as though in a dream, with a feeling of high exhilaration flooding over him. He remembered feeling that way once as a boy when a heavy storm had passed, taking its wracks of clouds with it, and the sinking sun had come out to turn all the trees to emeralds.
And now, beyond life, and beyond death, with eternity curving like a rainbow of light around them, they dashed on and on into the unknown.
Time did not exist. Space had a new concept. Speed was something that advanced them. It was little more than a sensation until Alpha Centauri began to loom larger upon their screens. From their vantage point in Trans-Einsteinian space, it did not look like a star at all. It was two intertwined circular spirals of light, and at the intervals where the two coils met were little nodules of gold.
The crew was given instructions on the anticipated sensations that were to follow.