Arcot opened the heavy relux door, leading the way into the next room, which was twice the size of the power room. The center of the floor was occupied by a heavy pedestal of lux metal upon which was a huge, relux-encased, double torus storage coil. There was a large switchboard at the opposite end, while around the room, in ordered groups, stood the familiar double coils, each five feet in diameter. The space within them was already darkening.
"Well," said Arcot, senior, "that's some battery of power coils, considering the amount of energy one can store. But what's the big one for?"
"That's the main space control," the younger Arcot answered. "While our power is stored in the smaller ones, we can shoot it into this one, which, you will notice, is constructed slightly differently. Instead of holding the field within it, completely enclosed, the big one will affect all the space about it. We will then be enclosed in what might be called a hyperspace of our own making."
"I see," said his father. "You go into hyperspace and move at any speed you please. But how will you see where you're going?"
"We won't, as far as I know. I don't expect to see a thing while we're in that hyperspace. We'll simply aim the ship in the direction we want to go and then go into hyperspace. The only thing we have to avoid is stars; their gravitational fields would drain the energy out of the apparatus and we'd end up in the center of a white-hot star. Meteors and such, we don't have to worry about; their fields aren't strong enough to drain the coils, and since we won't be in normal space, we can't hit them."
The elder Morey looked worried. "If you can't see your way back you'll get lost! And you can't radio back for help."
"Worse than that!" said Arcot. "We couldn't receive a signal of any kind after we get more than three hundred light years away; there weren't any radios before that.
"What we'll do is locate ourselves through the sun's light. We'll take photographs every so often and orient ourselves by them when we come back."
"That sounds like an excellent method of stellar navigation," agreed Morey senior. "Let's see the rest of the ship." He turned and walked toward the farther door.
The next room was the laboratory. On one side of the room was a complete physics lab and on the other was a well-stocked and well-equipped chemistry lab. They could perform many experiments here that no man had been able to perform due to lack of power. In this ship they had more generating facilities than all the power stations of Earth combined!