"Lucky we shielded those relays," Arcot muttered. The tremendous surge of current set up a magnetic field that turned knives and forks and, as Wade found to his intense disgust, stopped watches that were not magnetically shielded.
Space was utterly black about them now; there wasn't the slightest hint of light. The ten seconds that Arcot had allowed dragged slowly. Then at last came the heavy crashing of the huge relays; the current flowed back into the storage coils, and space became normal again. They were alone in the blackness.
Morey dove swiftly for the observatory. Before them, there was little to see; the dim glow of nebulae millions of light years away was scarcely visible to the naked eye, despite the clarity of space.
Behind them, like a shining horizon, they saw the mass of the Galaxy for the first time as free observers.
Morey began to make swift calculations of the distance they had come by measuring the apparent change in diameter of the Galaxy.
Arcot floated into the room after him and watched as Morey made his observations and began to work swiftly with pencil and paper. "What do you make?" Arcot asked.
"Mmmmm. Let's see." Morey worked a moment with his slide rule. "We made good time! Twenty-nine light years in ten seconds! You had it on at half power—the velocity goes up as the cube of the power—doubling the power, then, gives us eight times the velocity—Hmmmmmm." He readjusted the slide rule and slid the hairline over a bit. "We can make ten million light years in a little less than five days at full power.
"But I suggest we make another stop in six hours. That will put us about five radii, or half a million light years from the Galaxy. We'll need to take some more photographs to help us retrace our steps to Earth."
"All right, Morey," Arcot agreed. "It's up to you. Get your photos here and we'll go on. By the way, I think you ought to watch the instruments in the power room; this will be our first test at full power. We figured we'd make twenty light years per second, and it looks as if it's going to be closer to twenty-four."
A few minutes later, Arcot seated himself at the control board and flipped on the intercom to the power room. "All ready, Morey? I just happened to think—it might be a good idea to pick out our galaxy now and start toward it."