Muttering, "I was afraid of that," he brushed by us to the control booth and slammed the door behind him. A half-hour later he came out and again went to the telescope. Glancing through it, he made adjustments and then read them. Dashing back to the table he again scribbled some figures. When he had finished he stood there, his head bowed, staring at them. Then he looked up at our faces and said solemnly, "What I have been fearing in the back of my mind has happened. The tellecarbon no longer responds to mental suggestion. It has taken over control of the ship itself and, judging from our present course, we aren't going to ever get to Mars."
"What do you mean?" Lahoma asked.
"I mean," Jud answered slowly, "that at present we have a velocity great enough to escape from the solar system and that it is increasing every moment. Furthermore, a half-hour of concentration on the tellecarbon has not altered our course in the slightest. Wherever we are headed, it is not any planet in this system!"
The effect of his words cannot be imagined by anyone not in the position we were in. We stood there stunned. Our little, spinning world of iron and steel kept on spinning. Our gravity, which we had become accustomed to, was different in many ways than flat gravity. For example, our floor was curved, yet a dime dropped on it would roll in any direction along the curve just like it was a flat surface. But something near the center tube of the ship was practically weightless. So the center of gravity of our bodies was not the same as its center of mass. This made itself felt in thousands of little things. Heart action, sense of balance, and even in walking.
Picture, if you can, Jud standing several feet from me, his body forming an angle of about thirty degrees with mine, both of our bodies erect, our expressions serious. Picture also Lahoma and Mallory, their bodies at still different angles. Throw in the absolute silence of that moment. Not a single sound except our breathing, not even a creak from the ship. If there had only been a cricket to chirp, or a snake, or a fly buzzing, to make it seem like good old terra firma—but there was only the interstellar silence and the absolute lack of vibration in the air and the ship. And nearly two months of it, soaked into the marrow of our bones.
I for one would have welcomed a hit against the hull at that moment to take us out of ourselves and make us fight for our existence. Anything except the silent impersonal inexorableness of the lonely universe.
In ten more months our food would be exhausted. In two years our air could no longer be renewed because the chemicals which renewed it would be no good. Our water supply would last forever, with the system of recovery by distillation we had set up. But what is a year's food supply? If we tossed the tellecarbon out into the void and rode free it would be hundreds of years before our ship again entered the solar system in its long ellipse. And if we kept the tellecarbon in the ship, in another week even that hope would be gone. We could never return! UNLESS we could regain control of the tellecarbon.
Lahoma voiced the question that came to all our minds at the same time.
"What could possibly be the cause of the change in the tellecarbon?" And none of us had an answer.