The fifteen-meter diameter sphere of the Skylark Two streaked through space at a constant one gravity's acceleration. Although its dual matter-annihilation drives, each fueled by a two-hundred kilogram bar of solid copper, were capable of nearly twenty times this, even a few seconds of full power would be enough to knock the ship's crew unconscious. They were in no real hurry, so a steady one gee, accelerating by ten meters per second every second, was used for the comfort of the crew.
Richard Seaton, the designer and nominal commander of Skylark, was using a mariner's sextant to take star sightings for navigation. As he made each measurement, he entered the numbers into the mechanical navigation computer and turned a few dials, taking note of the result. Four reference stars were needed at minimum to fix Skylark's position in space, but he measured a second set of four to double check his results. Finally, setting down the sextant, he took pen in hand and began the task of converting the computer output into the coordinates for their location.
Martin Reynolds Crane, his longtime friend and partner in creating the Skylark, had up until this point been chatting with their wives, Dorothy Seaton and Margaret Crane. Now he stood up and walked across the Skylark's bridge to address Seaton.
"How much farther to Earth?" Crane asked.
Seaton looked over his calculations again. "If we keep this acceleration, then it's forty-one more hours till we turn around and start deccelerating, and then nine days more to Earth.
It was at that moment that the Skylark suddenly rotated through one hundred and eighty degrees while its acceleration nearly tripled. Crane strained to remain standing as he staggared over to the helmsman's console to investigate.
"What the bloody hell are you doing?!" cried DuQuesne, who was crawling up the staircase from the lower deck.
"It's not the engines!" Crane shouted as he glanced over the instruments. "Some outside force must be accelerating us!"
"We're still travelling in a straight line!" Seaton added.
DuQuesne dragged himself over to the engineering console and examined the readouts. "Hull temperature on the forward-facing side is at eighteen hundred Celsius and rising!"
Seaton's eyebrows knitted together. "It's got to be a nebula! At this speed, the friction's converting all our speed into heat! We'll have to slow down or we'll be burnt to a crisp!"
"No good!" Crane shouted back. "If we deccelerated quickly enough for that, we'd be killed by the gee forces first!"
"Hull temperature at twenty-three hundred!" DuQuesne shouted over the growing whine of the hydrogen gas of the nebula rushing past Skylark's hull. The nebula may have been a hundred times emptier than the best vacuum that could be created on Earth, but to a spacecraft traveling at the speed necessary for interstellar travel, it might as well have been mud.
"We've got to do something!" DuQuesne cried. The hull, a meter-thick layer of Arenak, that wonderous synthetic material developed by the Osnomians, fifty times harder than pure diamond crystal, was already beginning to glow a dull red, and the crew could feel the heat radiating from it into the cabin.
Seaton used the edge of his hand to flip an entire bank of switches at once. "I'm dumping our water supply onto the outer hull surface! That should cool it!"
The whistling sound of Skylark's travel through the nebula changed to a loud roaring, much like the sound of a massive waterfall, as several tons of water were deposited on the hull, only to boil away as rapidly as it could be pumped.
"Hull temperature dropping. Now at sixteen hundred Celsius," DuQuesne reported.
For long minutes, the pumps continued to pour cooling water onto the hull to stave off the fearsome heat generated by Skylark's high-speed passage through the interstellar nebula. Finally, however, the pumps sputtered and ran dry as the ship's water supply was exhausted. There was nothing more to do but to trust to fate. But had it been enough?
DuQuesne stared at the temperature indicator. Slowly, very slowly, the temperature continued to drop, but drop it did. Meanwhile, the acceleration slowly dropped back to its former one gee.
"Hull temperature is still dropping," he announced. "We must be through the nebula, or else slowed down enough that the friction hardly matters."
"We're not out of the woods yet," said Crane. "We spent all our water cooling the hull. There's no way we can make it back to Earth with no water--we'd die of thirst in a week, not to mention that we can only run the engines at a quarter power with nothing to cool them."
"Well then what do you suggest?" DuQuesne asked.
"Find a planet with water and resupply, or failing that, an icy comet that we can mine for its water," Seaton said matter-of-factly. Little did they know that their impromptu search for water would lead them to encounter:
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(Posted Tue, 01 Jul 2003 10:32)
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