by Ross Rocklynne
The men were plunging down the gently curving surface of the mirror.
Above them were the stars of the universe, whose light was caught by the mirror, radiated and reradiated by its concave surface, and, unimpaired, was flung back into space as a conglomerate glow.
There were two of these men. One was Edward Deverel, a worldly wise, carefree giant of a man whose profession—up until the recent past—had been that of pirating canal boats on the planet Mars. The other, a hard, powerful man, was Lieutenant John Colbie, whose assignment it was to apprehend this corsair of the canals.
Theirs was a real predicament, for they were unable to produce, at present, any means of escape from the prison this smooth, shining, deep bowl of a mirror presented.
As to how it all came about—
* * * *
When Colbie, after his twelve-hour trek along the ammonia river which ran from the lake into which the Fountain poured its noxious ammonia liquids, finally reached Jupiter City, he was in a state of fatigue under which his muscles, every one of them, seemed to scream out a protest. He pressed the buzzer that let those within the air-lock understand that he was demanding admittance, and was decidedly relieved to see the huge valve swing open, throwing a glow of luminescence on the wildly swirling gases that raced across the surface of that mighty, poisonous planet Jupiter. Two men came forward. They covered him with hand weapons, and urged him inside the lock. The keeper of the lock desired to know Colbie’s business, and Colbie demanded that he be taken before the commander of the garrison—who was also mayor of the city—as things had, of necessity, to be run on a military basis.
Riding through the streets of the city, he was both thrilled and awed, after that tortuous ordeal in the wilds of Jupiter, by the consciousness of the great genius of the human race—that it was able, in the face of so many killing difficulties, to erect this domed city, so well equipped with the luxuries of Earthly life. For outside the city there was a pressure of fifteen thousand pounds to the square inch. There was a gravitation two and a half times that of Earth. There was not a breathable drop of oxygen in the atmosphere, and not a ray of light ever penetrated the vast cloud layer to the planet’s surface. But man had built the city, and it would remain forever, so solidly and efficiently was it constructed.
When Colbie came before the dome commander, that individual listened to his story, eyeing him keenly in the meanwhile.
“So you’re Lieutenant John Colbie, of the Interplanetary Police Force,” he mused. “Yet, not less than thirty-six hours ago another man stood before me and presented proof that he was John Colbie. One of you is wrong, I’d say, and no mistake about it.”
“I’ve told you my story—that other man was a criminal, Edward Deverel by name, and I was put on his trail. I caught up with him on Vulcan, near the Sun, and we found it was hollow by the simple expedient of falling through a cavity on its surface. I had Deverel prisoner then, but he proved a bit too smart for me. We were trapped there, well enough, at the center of gravity. But he figured that the gases filling the planet’s interior would expand as the planet came to perihelion, thus forming currents which Deverel used to his advantage in escaping the trap and eluding me at the same time. I found him again, but we were wrecked above Jupiter, fell into a pit with a liquid ammonia lake at the bottom. And Deverel, using, I’ll have to admit, remarkably astute powers of deduction, figured that the lake drained by means of a siphon of some height. He eluded me that way, and I was left in the pit. I finally caught on—from some deliberate hints he had let drop—and followed him through the siphon. But he was waiting for me at the other end, demanded my credentials, and extracted from me a promise that I’d stay where I was for twenty-four hours.” Colbie grinned in slight mirth. “So after twenty-four hours I came on. And now he’s gone.”
“ ‘Fraid he is,” admitted the other. “I had no reason to suspect he was an imposter, so I gave him a ship. Come to think of it, he seemed in a mighty hurry. Hm-m-m. How can I identify you as Lieutenant John Colbie?”
“Easy,” snapped Colbie. “I’m not unknown. There must be a few IPF men in the city. Let some of them identify me.”
“Good idea.” The man grimaced. “Something I should have done with the other man. However, that’s past. No use replotting an orbit you’ve swung. I’ll hunt up an IPF man or two.”
And this he did. Within the space of a few hours, the commander had no doubt that the man who stood before him was one Lieutenant John Colbie, a native of Earth, and in the service of the Interplanetary Police Force.
“Well, we’ll outfit you again, Lieutenant,” he assured Colbie. “What’s your course of action after that?”
Colbie, lolling in a deep chair, bathed, resplendent in borrowed clothing and refreshingly combed hair, cigarette drooping from a corner of his square lips, said, “My assignment was to apprehend a certain criminal; those are my orders. I just have to keep on trying.”
“Not if things go as they have,” said the other, smiling in such a manner that his sarcasm should have been without edge; but he saw immediately that he had said the wrong thing, for Colbie’s eyes narrowed half angrily. “Sorry,” he added quickly. And then apologetically, “Don’t blame you a bit. Must be a sore point. How come you aren’t in any especial hurry?” He deftly changed the subject.
“I should say I’m not in a hurry!” Colbie exclaimed feelingly. “I’ve been space-tied for a few months now, and I have to stuff a few of the civilized benefits into my life now and then. There’s no need for haste, anyway. Only way I can find Deverel is by deducing his destination, then going there.”
“Where do you think he went?” queried the other man interestedly.
“The new planet. I notice there’s quite a lot about it in the papers. It’s been making its way into the solar system for the past five or six months, I understand. It’s a real wanderer—probably been zipping through interstellar space for ages. There’s a good chance that’s where Deverel’s gone. He’s curious, insanely curious about all things bizarre, and he won’t be able to resist it—I hope,” he added.
“Good lead, anyway. It’ll be a worthwhile experience, too. No exploring parties have set foot on it. You two—if Deverel is there—will be the first to set foot on it. Hope you have good luck, this time,” he added sincerely.
Colbie drew smoke into lungs that had not known cigarette smoke for a full half-year. “If there’s any doubt in your mind, commander, let me assure you that Deverel’s already up for trial, as far as my capturing him is concerned. Yes, I feel it in my bones. He’s going back with me, this time.”
The two men then looked up statistics on the new planet. It was a large sphere of celestial flotsam, somewhere near five thousand miles in diameter, of extremely low density for its bulk. It was traveling at the good clip of eighty-two miles per second toward the Sun, but it was estimated that the speed would be cut in half by a near passage by Jupiter. Finally it would take up an orbit that would be located somewhere between those of Jupiter and Neptune.
Shooting through space at furious velocity in his new cruiser, Colbie’s lips were set and grim. His nerves were on edge. There was a flame in his brain. Truth to tell, he was so furious at Deverel’s repeated escapes that the more he thought about it, the less he found himself able to think straight.
He could see the new planet as a small, gray dot against the ubiquitous veil of stars. It was not yet named, but was destined to be called Cyclops, for a reason to be seen. And with the passing hours it grew in apparent size, until, seven days after Colbie had shot upward into space, fighting Jupiter’s gravitational fingers, it was a vast bulk in the heavens less than ten thousand miles distant. Colbie dived for it. He still had enormous speed, and was checking it with the greatest deceleration he could stand. When he came near enough to the planet, he used its gravitation as a further check. He started to circle it—and forthwith saw the “eye” of Cyclops staring up at him.
It was a mirror—a concave reflector, rather. But it looked like the eye of the planet, an eye that reflected starlight. Starlight, yes, because it was a reflector that caught the rays of the stars and threw them back to space. Indeed, Colbie, gazing on it awestruck, could see no slightest difference between the brilliance of the stars and the brilliance of that colossal mirror.
“Lord!” he whispered to himself, feeling half-reverent. He suddenly had a sensation of smallness, and realized in that second what an infinitesimal part of the universe he was. He lived for only the fraction of a second and surely was no larger than a sub-electron. For that mirror was artificial, had been fabricated by the powerful tools and intelligence of a race which had certainly lived at least thousands, perhaps millions of years ago. Who could tell how far Cyclops had traveled, plunging at steady pace across the void that separates our solar system from the nearest star? Who could tell the manner of people who had constructed it? One could only say that they had been engineers on a scale which human beings could not at present comprehend.
The mirror was perfect. Colbie took various readings on it, after the first mighty upsurge of awe had ebbed away. He found the diameter, about two miles less than a thousand; the depth, an approximate three hundred; and the shape, perfectly circular, perfectly curved. The albedo was so close to 1 that his instruments could not measure the infinitesimal fraction that it lacked!
And thereat, Colbie sat down and whistled loud and long. Man knew of no perfect reflector; it was deemed impossible, in fact. All materials will reflect light in some small degree, but more often the greater amount is absorbed. But the material of this colossus among reflectors reflected all light save an absolutely negligible amount of that which impinged on its surface. For Colbie knew that some of it was certainly absorbed—he did not believe in impossibilities. It was impossible that that mirror didn’t absorb some light. His instruments had been unable to measure it, but of course there were instruments on Earth that would measure that absorption when the time came for it. But they would have to be delicate indeed. Even at that, however, the albedo of this mirror was a thing almost beyond belief, and certainly beyond comprehension.
The mirror disappeared around the curve of the planet as Colbie’s ship plunged on, decreasing its velocity slowly but surely. Colbie forced his thoughts once more to the issue paramount in his mind—that of locating Deverel. But his exciting discovery of the mirror stayed in the back of his mind, and he was determined to know more about it. And he did; more thoroughly, in fact, than he liked at the time.
He now had his velocity under control. Hoping that Deverel had not detected his presence above the new planet, he gave himself up to the one problem that was perplexing him—where would Deverel have landed? Near the mirror; that was a certainty. Somewhere near the rim of the giant reflector—but that was anywhere on a circle three and a half thousand miles in circumference.
He finally resolved to scour the area in which Deverel would have landed. Training his single telescope downward so that it would sweep the entire area, he applied his photo-amplifiers to the light received, and then, keeping at a distance of about fifty miles from the surface of the planet so that Deverel could not possibly sight him with the naked eye, he darted around that circle at low speed, eye glued to the eyepiece of the telescope. He hoped thus to see the outlaw’s ship.
And he did. It lay at the base of one of those mountains of Cyclops that flaunted a sharp peak thousands of feet up into the sky. That mountain swept down to foothills that terminated abruptly in a level plain scarcely more than seven or eight miles from the rim of the great mirror.
Colbie sighed in lusty relief, entirely glad that his assumption of Deverel’s destination had now been proven absolutely correct.
Shooting the ship upward, and then, keeping that single landmark— the mountain—in view, he came up behind it, and, by dint of much use of forward, stern, and under jets, jockeyed the cruiser to rest far enough around the curve of the mountain so that the outlaw should not note his advent.
He put out a vial to draw in a sample of the planet’s atmosphere, but as he had with good reason suspected, that atmosphere was nonexistent. The undistorted brightness of the stars had almost made him sure of it. He struggled into a spacesuit, buckled on his weapons, attached oxygen tank, screwed down his helmet, opened the air-lock and jumped down to the planet’s surface. It was hard. Examining it, he found that it consisted of ores in a frozen, earthy state. Whether this was true of the entire planet he did not know.
He started around the curved base of the mountain, and, after the first mile, discovered that traveling across the surface of Cyclops was a terrific task. The planet was seamed and cracked in dozens of places; great gaping cracks which presented definite handicaps to a safe journey of any length. He found that he had to take precautions indeed, and often searched extensively for crevices narrow enough to leap with safety. He worried along, taking his time, but he was beginning to realize that he might not have as much of that at his disposal as he had indicated to the dome commander back on Jupiter.
So that, after a good many hours, he rounded the breast of the mountain and caught the black shine of Deverel’s falsely acquired ship.
But he saw nothing of Deverel.
He threw himself to the ground. Suddenly he was painfully conscious that his heart was thumping. The thought of physical danger in no way caused this condition—he was simply afraid that Deverel might elude capture again by putting his tricky mentality to work. The competition between these two—law and disorder personified—had become a personal contest. Truth to tell, the IP man respected and rather admired Deverel’s uncanny ability to escape him, not the fact that he had escaped. Colbie had to bring him back, but respected Deverel’s unusual genius at escaping tight spots. But—he had to bring the man in, or admit the outlaw a better man than he.
In this uneasy state of mind, he lay there, projector out. It could shoot explosive missiles at thousands of feet per second, and was, in this, the twenty-third century, the ultimate in destructive hand weapons.
Now, as he lay there, his eyes constantly on the ship and the area about, he turned his thoughts in a new direction. In the name of all that was holy, why had Deverel come here? Hadn’t he realized it was the first place Colbie would look? Certainly he must have known it. Then why had he come?
Colbie thought he saw the answer. Deverel had planned on leaving this planet long before the space policeman had arrived. He had had a full thirty-six hours’ start on Colbie, and he decided that would give him enough time for the opportunity he so craved—to visit this new planet, and determine to his own satisfaction whether or not there was anything about it which would satisfy that love he had for the bizarre.
He had had sufficient time. Sufficient time to satisfy himself as to the nature of the mirror; sufficient time to leave again, and break up his trail in the trackless wastes of space.
But he hadn’t left.
Why?
And then Colbie began to feel acute mental discomfort. And the longer he lay there, the worse it became. He became conscience stricken. And why? Because Deverel might be lying in there sick, and Colbie could not risk coming out into the open until he knew absolutely Deverel’s whereabouts. And perhaps Deverel lay in there dying. Space sickness is a recognized malady, and it is not infrequent. It is ascribed to any number of causes, among which are noted positive and negative deceleration, a missing vital element in synthetic air, and the lack of gravitation. Its only cure is absolute rest under a decent gravitation. And—such a cure was impossible for a man who was dependent on no one but himself.
Colbie squirmed uncomfortably. “The fool might be dying!” he snapped angrily to himself. “While I’m lying here. But I can’t give myself away.”
But his nerves grew more and more tense. He dreaded the thought of Deverel sick in there while he was able to give him help. And in the end he sprang to his feet, determined he wouldn’t let the uncertainty of the situation wear on him any longer.
And then his radio receiver woke to life, and screeched calmly though waveringly, “You’re out there, Colbie. You would be there. Listen—” the voice dwindled away, and then came back in renewed strength. “I’m sick, Colbie, rottenly sick. I think I’m going to do the death act. It’s the stomach that really hurts, though there’s the ears too. They hurt, too, and they send the blind staggers right through the brain. I’m sweating—” The voice ebbed, rushed back. “If you want to—come in and give me a hand—will you? Then you can take me back—” The voice groaned off, and sliding sounds came through the receiver.
But already Colbie was tearing out into the open, racing across the space separating him from the ship, a wave of pity for the helpless man breaking over him.
The outer valve was open. Colbie climbed in, drew it shut, manipulated the controls of the inner valve, and debouched into the ship proper.
He was now amidships, standing opposite the lazaret. Forward was the control cabin and vital machinery, abaft, in the stern compartment, were sleeping and living quarters.
Colbie bounded aft, swung through a door, and saw a pitiable sight indeed. The room was incredibly littered with such items as soiled clothing, and dishes with the scum of meals dried onto them. In the middle of the room was a table, and on that table an electric fan was whirling full blast, flinging a steady current of air upon a man who lay stark naked on a bunk which seemed the ultimate in human filth.
Deverel lay there, twisting, squirming, panting, moaning, his eyes rolling, and rivulets of sweat bubbling up from his queerly yellow skin, and flowing down to encounter a plain, stained mattress.
The first thing Colbie did was to snap off that venomous, killing fan. In fact, to sweep it from the table with one blow of his open palm. The next was to take Deverel’s pulse. It was quick, dangerously high, but certainly not predicting the close approach of death. In another day it might have ceased altogether, but at present there was plenty of chance.
Deverel’s eyes lolled over to Colbie’s, and his lips drew back painfully over handsome white teeth.
“Glad you came,” he whispered, and then his head dropped back and his eyes closed. He was not asleep; the knowledge that he was now in the hands of a competent person sent him into a dead faint.
Colbie knew what to do in cases like this. He went forward to the control room, manipulated oxygen tank valves, and increased the quantity of oxygen in the air. He got all the clean linen he could find, and bathed Deverel from head to foot in lukewarm water. He turned the mattress over, put on clean sheets, and then lifted Deverel lightly as a baby back on to it. Then he stuck a thermometer into the outlaw’s mouth.
He cleaned the room, occupying a full hour in washing dishes with a minimum of valuable water. Then he took meats and vegetables from the refrigerator, where they had doubtless reposed for months perfectly frozen, and started a pot of soup.
And that was all he could do for a while.
He sat down and waited, taking many readings on the thermometer.
And Deverel’s temperature went down. His breathing became even, and then he slept. Thirteen hours later he awoke.
“Hi, Lieutenant,” he said.
“Hi, yourself!” Colbie put down the magazine with which he had been really enjoying himself for the first time in months. “How’s the temperature?” he inquired.
“Gone. Thanks a lot,” he added carelessly, but he was serious. “You know I mean it, too.”
“Sure.” Colbie waved it aside. “A pleasure—I was glad to do it, y’know.” He fingered the pages of the magazine abstractedly. He jerked a thumb. “How’d you know I was out there?”
“Didn’t know it.” Deverel laughed. “It’s a cinch if you weren’t out there you wouldn’t have heard me say I knew you were.”
“That’s right.” Colbie laughed, too, and blue eyes and gray eyes met each other in mutual amusement. “Like some soup?”
Deverel said enthusiastically that he did. So that these two men, mutually respecting enemies of each other, sat down and ate for all the world as if each was an affectionate friend of the other.
For many days life was easy. No grueling flights through harsh space. No anxieties. No dread of death to come. No fear of insanely impersonal meteors. Here on Cyclops, the planet of the great mirror, living was a pleasure.
Deverel regained his health. He was finally able to get out of bed and walk around. With that done, it was not long before Deverel was considered a well man once more. Of course, the old life then had to be recognized. There had been a tacit understanding between the two men— for a little while their personal relationships did not stand. That was fair.
But that understanding had to be sundered eventually, and Deverel did not put the time off. The moment he felt his strength had returned in full measure, he said: “Well, it’s been fun while it lasted. But it’s time for us to sort of assume our natural antagonisms. So you put me in irons—right away. Or I’ll give you a swift, underhanded poke to the jaw.”
Colbie regarded him judicially. “Fair enough,” he conceded. “You wouldn’t mind getting me about the heaviest pair of leg and arm irons from the lazaret, would you?” he inquired quizzically.
“Not at all,” murmured Deverel politely.
“Wait a minute,” Colbie said uneasily. He leaned forward. “Now look. Did you notice the mirror?”
“Certainly. And damned curious about it, too.”
“And I. Now suppose we let this unwritten pact of mutual noninterference drag on for a while, just enough to allow us to explore? Y’know, I haven’t got a time limit on me—”
“Oh”—Deverel waved a scornful hand—”neither have I. Let’s let it drag on, shall we?” he said in the unconscious manner of a youngster excited over the prospect of a pleasing new toy. “You’ve got my promise, Colbie— I won’t try to get away.”
They saluted each other with a grin, and forthwith made ready for their adventure in exploration.
* * * *
Sleep was the first preparation. After a good many hours, they set off across the gouged, forbidding plain. The stars looked down at them un-windingly through the vacuum separating them from Cyclops’ harsh terrain. Behind the men loomed the sharp, high peaks of the mountain in whose proximity Deverel had put down his stolen cruiser.
They were decked out as completely as they deemed advisable. They had oxygen, water, and food for at least a day. Colbie had decided not to carry his projector. It was a clumsy weapon, and he saw no possible use for it. Thus, attached by a two-hundred-foot hank of rope, which was suited in composition to the demands the cold and vacuum of space might make upon it, they wended their starlit way across Cyclops. When they were not using the rope fording dangerous chasms, they wound it up about them. They progressed steadily toward the rim of the reflector which probably had been constructed long before man had made the first full stride toward harmonized society.
Twice, Colbie slipped at the termination of a leap which taxed all his physical powers, and twice would have plunged into the apparently bottomless gorges below; and twice Deverel braced himself against the rims of the pits, and pulled the Interplanetary man back to safety. In both cases they made extended searches for narrower crevices.
Slowly but surely they worked their way to the rim, and finally struck level country. The last mile was a true plain, so unmarred that they suspected it must have been smoothed over artificially at some long-gone period. It struck Colbie that this would have been a much better place for Deverel to have put his ship down. Deverel explained that at the moment the first spasm of sickness had hit him, he was not in a frame of mind to care where he landed.
They came, then, to the rim.
They regarded with awe the black wall. It was composed of some dully hued metal. It stretched away from them in a slow curve that lost itself to their eyes many miles to either side of them. It was perfectly formed and unmarred in the slightest particular, about twice as tall as a man.
Deverel struck a pose, and said vibrantly, “The mirror!” But certainly he was not unshaken by the anciently constructed reflector.
Colbie put in wonderingly, “Some things a man can’t believe. I wonder how old this thing is—wonder who made it—how they made it! Lord, what engineers they must have been! What a job!”
“What a contract for the firm that landed the bid!” Deverel put in, smiling. “What do you say we top it? I’ve got an itch to see it firsthand—touch it.”
Colbie nodded, and Deverel braced himself against the wall, forming a cup with his heavily gloved hands. “Up you go! But once you get up,” he warned, “careful you don’t topple. That’d mean trouble in large doses.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Colbie said grimly. “If any one falls, it’s going to be you, not me.”
He put one foot in the outlaw’s hands. Deverel heaved. Colbie shot up and caught both hands around the rim, which sloped inward. That done, he drew himself upward so that he was sitting carefully on the rim, facing Deverel.
With much effort and care, he drew Deverel beside him, and then, as if with mutual consent, they twisted their heads and sent their eyes out over the great mirror.
At once, all sense of perspective and balance left them. Light from all directions smote them, blinded them, sent a haze into their minds. Downward and to all sides and above, there was light. In fact, the light of the stars and the light of the mirror were indistinguishable in the split second when that bewildering sensation of instability struck them. Colbie thought fleetingly and in panic that he was poised upside down on the most insecure foothold in the universe. He could not decide, in that split second, which was the true sky.
So—he clutched at the wrong sky, and toppled over the rim.
Deverel, feeling precisely the same sensations, would have recovered in time had not the rope attaching him to Colbie forcefully jerked at him a second before he had fully decided which way was up. So they both fell down the angle of the mirror, and were, in a second, shooting haphazardly, horridly, through an interminable pressing mist of light and nothing but light.
They were plunging downward so swiftly, and yet so lightly, that they might have been wafted along on an intangible beam of force. For they felt nothing. Not the slightest sensation of sliding—only a sense of acceleration downward.
After that first moment of heart-stopping horror, after the first panic, the first moment of unutterable vertigo had passed, Colbie’s nerves started quivering violently. Deliberately he quieted them by closing his eyes and clenching his fists. Then he opened fists and eyes both, and looked around for Deverel. Deverel was about five feet behind him.
Deverel was looking at him from eyes that were extremely concerned.
“And I said to be careful,” he snapped angrily. Colbie started to open his lips with hot words, but Deverel waved a hand disgustedly. “I know, I know. My fault, too.” He drew a long breath and occupied himself putting his head where his feet were.
Colbie did the same, and then very gingerly tried to stay his fall, by pressing his hands and feet on the surface of the mirror. This had not the slightest effect on his position or his velocity. He found that it was extremely difficult to twist his body except by flinging his arms around, but he accomplished this not by any aid the mirror gave him. His hands in no slightest degree rubbed against the mirror’s surface. In fact, he felt no sensation which told him that his hands might have touched a surface. It was as if he had run a finger over a vat of some viscous slime, as if the slime had imparted no heat, no cold, had not adhered to his finger, had not impeded its motion in any way, had merely guided it along a path determined by its own surface!
He closed his eyes painfully. The trend of his thoughts hinted of insanity. He tried to analyze his sensations. He was falling. Falling straight down, at the acceleration the gravity of this planet gave his body. But he knew he was merely gliding along at a downward angle. He was simply being guided by a substance which in no degree impeded the action of gravity. That must mean-
No friction!
The words exploded in his brain—and exploded crazily from his mouth. “No friction!”
Deverel stared at him, and then frantically made tests. He tried to rub that surface. He felt nothing, nothing that held his hand back—as if it had slid along infinitely smooth ice.
“You’re right,” he said, staring stupidly. “That’s what it must be. Hell —it’s frictionless!” And then he cried, “But that can’t be!” and his lips twitched. “There can’t be anything that’s frictionless. You know that. It can’t be done!”
Colbie shook his head as one speaking to a child. “No, Deverel,” he found himself saying in a kindly voice, an insistent but pitying voice, “it has no rub. You put your hand on it and push. And does it hold your hand back? No.” He shook his head sadly. “They made this stuff frictionless.”
And as they shot downward into the sea of light, they held each other with their dumbfounded eyes.
The outlaw sharply shook his head. “We’re making fools of ourselves. Let’s face it. There isn’t any friction. Now—now we’re up against something.”
“I know it.”
Colbie almost drunkenly squirmed around, and finally maneuvered until he was sitting, his feet crossed under him, his eyes trained hypnotically into the downward distance. Or was there any distance? There was no horizon. The stars, and the conglomerate glow of the mirror that was the absolute reflection of the stars, merged with each other.
‘We’ve got to pull ourselves together,” he said stubbornly. “Let’s think this out. We’ve got to get used to it.”
“Right.” And Deverel did the first sensible thing by twisting and looking behind him. They had toppled over the rim of the mirror almost exactly two minutes ago, and though their velocity had steadily been mounting, there was a horizon back there which could be seen. It was mainly indicated by that lofty, slowly rising mountain which loomed up against the rim of the mirror. He felt that it was a good landmark—somehow, that was the place they had to get back to.
“Now look,” he said seriously to Colbie, “let’s talk this over.” His voice was slightly metallic as it came through Colbie’s earphones. “Before I landed on this planet I took some readings on that mirror same as you, and I guess I came to the same conclusions.
“Long ago, maybe a million years, there was a race of men—or beings— who lived on a planet that circled a sun just like ours, perhaps. They had a satellite, this planet we’re on. They were engineers on a monster scale. I have no doubt they could have remade their planet, and even their solar system, exactly to suit themselves—and maybe they did. But they made this satellite over to suit themselves, that’s certain. They gouged out—how I wouldn’t know—a section of this planet that corresponded to the bottom part of a sphere. The radius of that sphere—I figured it—is about 1600 miles out in space. Then, so help me—I wouldn’t know this, either—they coated that gouged-out surface with some substance which, when it hardened, formed an absolutely smooth surface. You came to the same conclusions I did, didn’t you? That it was such a perfect reflector you couldn’t measure the amount it didn’t reflect?”
Colbie, listening with interest, nodded. “And we should have seen that such a good reflector would be frictionless, too. Couldn’t be any other way. And say!” he exclaimed. “This stuff can’t be frictionless. We knew it couldn’t reflect all light. It simply reflects all but a negligible amount of light, and it’s got a negligible amount of friction, too!”
“That’s right!” Deverel was genuinely relieved. “That idea of no friction at all had me going cuckoo. ‘Course not—there can’t be any surface that’s got no friction at all. The molecular state of matter forbids it. No matter how close you crowd the molecules, they still make an infinitesimally bumpy surface.
“Now why did they make the mirror? Only reason I can see—power. They must have had a heat engine. It generated power in huge amounts, undoubtedly, and perhaps the power they took in that way was broadcast back to their planet. Or perhaps it was a weapon—another mirror, plane this time, which could rotate and train a searing beam of heat on an enemy ship. Would that ship blister! And they might have been able to rotate this satellite at will, too-
“Then something happened. Those people lost their satellite. Maybe their own planet exploded. Maybe their sun exploded, and this planet went shooting away, and finally our Sun grabbed it.
“And that’s a fair explanation—the only one, as far as I see. Unless, of course, it was meant to be something that was in the experimental stage and was never completed.”
“The magical mirror,” Colbie interspersed softly. But neither of them then knew exactly what magical characteristics it did possess.
For a moment they were silent. “Well”—Deverel had a shrug in his voice —”we can’t do anything now—can we? Shall we eat?”
“Why not?”
They ate in the strange manner necessitated by spacesuits. By buttons in a niche outside their suits they manipulated levers which reached into a complicated mechanism, pulling out food pills—tasteless things—and water, which they sucked through a tube.
“Now,” said Deverel, smacking his lips as if he had just eaten a square meal, “this is just another situation, and not a fairy tale. Proved it by eating, which is so mortal it’s disgusting. Where we bound?”
“For the bottom—”
“Ho—not at all! We’re almost at bottom now—notice how the angle’s been straightening out? It’s almost 180° now. Let’s see. Phew!” He had looked at his chronometer. “We’ve fallen three hundred miles in something like eight or nine minutes.” Colbie started to protest, but the outlaw said, “Sure, to all intents and purposes we’ve simply fallen three hundred miles —the depth of the mirror. Remember, there isn’t any friction that’d hold us back, and the inclined surface we came down on just guided us. And that means we’re going to bounce right back to the other rim—see?”
“Ye gods, yes!” yelled Colbie, then grimaced. “But we won’t quite reach the rim. Just that damnably small amount of friction will hold us back fifty or some feet. If there weren’t any friction things would be simple— we’d reach the other rim exactly.”
“Sure. And climb over. Gravity gave us the momentum going down, but she’ll occupy herself taking it away at the same rate going up.”
While they had been talking, they had passed bottom—quite definitely. They were going up, for the angle was slowly but surely increasing.
“We won’t make it,” Colbie said disconsolately. “There’s the rub.”
In the thoughtfully melancholy voice of the Danish prince, Deverel muttered, “Aye, there’s the rub; for in that sleep of death, what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause.”
“And that’s appropriate, isn’t it!” Colbie sneered.
“I played Hamlet once. Long time ago, of course, but I was pretty good. You know that second act scene where he—”
“Skip it! Forget it—I don’t want to hear it. Let’s get on. There is the friction—infinitesimal. It doesn’t help at all when you try to change or retard your motion; but in the long run, it’ll build up a total resistance great enough to keep us from the rim.”
“Check, check, and check,” agreed the outlaw, touching the fingers of his left hand with the index finger of his right.
“That’s our situation. Looks hopeless.”
“Maybe,” Deverel declared. “Let me add some further facts. We’re dropping down at an acceleration of twelve feet a second per second. At bottom, three hundred miles down, we had a terrific final velocity. Don’t know exactly what it is, but there’s a formula for it. Going up, gravity will be right on our tails, lopping off twelve feet of speed for every second. Notice I say up and down. I mean it. Our angular speed is something else again, and is certainly much greater.”
Then, as he saw Colbie’s impatient look, “I don’t know how we get out. Normally, when you get in some place, you go out the same way—but they closed the door on us. And, of course, I don’t see how we can change direction.”
The IP man crossed his legs under him the other way for a change. He squinted upward. “Getting near top again. Damn that light. After a while, I’ll go blind.”
“Shut your eyes,” Deverel told him callously, then, “Lord,” he remarked whimsically, his cynical, yet friendly, eyes crinkling. “I’m glad we’re what we are, Colbie. You have to chase me and I always feel obliged to run. Then we ran into the most interesting experiences. I’ve had plenty of good times looting canal boats on Mars—did I ever tell you how hard it was squeezing the rings off the Empress’ fingers? I used plenty of soap and water—and she was horrified at the way I wasted the water—but somehow I’m glad they got after me. And you are, too,” he added as if in self-defense.
“Sure,” Colbie remarked. “But in a way I’m not. You’re a likeable fellow. I admit it. But you haven’t got the instinct to help make an organized unit of society—you’re a gear out of mesh. ‘Course, there’s others like you—but it’s you I have to take in. I suppose I’ll do it, too.”
“Forgetting the mix-up we’re in?”
“No. Just trying to match your own superb confidence in crises like this one.”
“Touché” The outlaw grinned. “Any ideas to match your confidence?”
“Not a shard.”
“Me either—yet. By the way”—and here Deverel regarded Colbie thoughtfully—”I’m keeping anything I learn to myself—anything that might get us out, I mean.”
“Meaning?” Colbie’s eyes hardened.
“I’ll sell what I know for a price.”
“Ho! Freedom, I guess!” Colbie said sardonically.
“Well—not that, exactly. I’ll tell you what it is, if I ever get anything to sell.”
Colbie studied him, shrugged his shoulders carelessly. He looked over his shoulder, but he didn’t see the approaching rim.
“Our angle’s much steeper.” Deverel followed his thought. “The rim isn’t far away. Couple minutes yet.”
“We won’t make it though,” Colbie said regretfully, “unless there’s something else we don’t know anything about”
In a few minutes, they saw the rim outlined against the black sides of an uneven mountain range which might have been set back from the rim anywhere from ten to twenty miles. They regarded its stubborn approach with anxiety.
So slowly it came toward them—and so rapidly their velocity was being decreased to the zero point! Nerves tensed, fists clenched, eyes strained. But intuitively, rather than from any deliberate mental calculation, they felt that they would not reach it. Their velocity was simply not enough.
And it wasn’t. Slowly—compared to their earlier enormous velocities— they rose toward the rim which was so painfully near, yet so infinitely difficult to reach. One moment, then, they were rising; the next, falling. There had been no pause, or if there had been it was nestled close to that infinitesimal space of time which man will never measure. They began to fall.
In a voice that held words of chagrin—true to human nature, he had not given up hope—Colbie said, “Missed it—by about ten vertical feet, as a close guess. Next time we swing across this damned mirror we’ll miss it by twenty feet.”
“Something like that,” Deverel agreed abstractedly. At the moment they had fallen, he had noted the time down to the exact fraction of a second. And he kept it in mind. Not that he had any idea of its ultimate benefit then, but he felt it might be a good thing to know. “Let’s see,” he was muttering to himself, and using Colbie’s phrase, went on, “the time for one swing across—”
And he didn’t finish the sentence. For an idea, a conception so alluring, so utterly startling, leaped into his mind, that he drew his breath inward through his suddenly meeting teeth. “Lord!” he whispered, and almost as if he were stunned, he dropped back, lying full length, his head cupped in the palms of his joined hands. And he saw the stars.
The two men were zooming along at a good fast clip that was building on itself. They were guided by the frictionless stuff of the mirror, and pulled by the force of gravity.
And above were the stars. So cold, so remote, so harshly, quietly beautiful. Deverel was looking at them, hard. They were exciting stars. They never changed their position as a whole. They looked the same as when they—the men—had gone plunging down the curve of the mirror.
* * * *
While Deverel lay there on his back, his brow wrinkled in thought, Colbie watched him, watched him for a good many minutes, while they plummeted into the depths of the shining bowl. In an incredibly short time, they reached bottom—and Colbie grew tired of trying to read the outlaw’s thoughts. He tried to rise to his feet. He went through a number of gyrations, which left him lying face down, looking at his own reflections.
Deverel had come out of his brown study, and was watching amusedly. “If there were a large enough area on the soles of your feet, m’lad, you could stand easily enough. But when you sit down, the center of gravity of your body is considerably lowered, and it’s easy. So you’ll never stand up unless by some miracle of balance.”
This bit of wisdom was apparent. Colbie sat down, drew the water tube into his mouth, and sucked with abandon. Then he regarded Deverel knowingly. “Been thinking, eh? What about?”
“The mirror,” Deverel replied solemnly. “I have to keep it to myself, though—sorry!”
“Likely!” There was a tigerish snarl implied in Colbie’s voice overtones.
Deverel’s worldly wise eyes grew sardonic. “Sure—I’ve been doing a lot of figuring, and I’ve found out a lot of stuff. Interesting, unusual. But there’s something missing, Colbie—something I can’t put my finger on. If I had it—and I will get it—I could get us out of here. Any suggestions?” he concluded, regarding Colbie sidewise out of a laughing eye.
“If I had them,” pointedly, “I’d keep ‘em. By the way, are you being fair? Withholding information? I’m referring to your promise—that you wouldn’t try to get away.”
“I did make a promise, just as you said—that I wouldn’t try to get away. And I haven’t. And I won’t until you tell me it’s all right if I try. Get it?” He fixed Colbie with a rigidly extended index finger, and went on in tight tones of significance. “Let’s be ourselves from now on, Colbie—outlaw and cop! Right now, we’re just partners in adventure. But you, just by saying so, can make us what we really are—and I’d be your prisoner. D’you see? Do that, Colbie, and I’ll get us out of here!”
Colbie felt a slow flush rising to his face. Suddenly he felt utterly humiliated; felt as if his intelligence had been insulted and mocked at. Colbie’s voice exploded, an eruption of searing wrath. “No! Listen,” he went on in a low, deadly, flat voice, “the answer is no. No from now on. I don’t give a damn. I don’t give a damn if we slide back and forth here for eternity—that’s what we’ll do if you wait for me to give in to you and your damned insulting demand. You’ve got the brass—” Colbie choked apoplectically, and stopped. He waved his arms helplessly, glaring at the other man. After a while he went on, his voice now even, “You suggest I haven’t got the mentality or the resource to find my—our—way out of here. Maybe I haven’t. Maybe I’m a damned dummy. But I’ll tell you something that’s going to make you squirm; you’re going to see me outbluff you! And you’re going to give in to me! Remember it.”
He sank back, glaring.
Deverel’s eyes were popping. “Well!” he exclaimed in astonishment. “Phew! Glad you got that off your chest—you sure take the fits!”
A lot of thought went on under Deverel’s helmet, and in a way they amused him. But they were all directed toward one end—escape. This was a new Colbie, an undreamed-of Colbie, he saw here, and he was going to be a tough nut to crack! So Deverel finally said, “You’re going to outbluff me, you said.”
“Sure. Now, ever, and always. Something else, my dear mental marvel —it’s you that’s going to do the thinking.” His voice was contemptuous. “Now, go ahead and use that so superior gray matter you’re claiming.”
Deverel’s lips twitched. He said, shrugging, “If that’s the way you want it But you’re crazy.”
Colbie refused to answer.
“Well.” The outlaw laughed lightly. “Now we’ve got our own personal feud mapped out. We won’t be on speaking terms for maybe two or three hours. Incidentally, we’ll be bored to death. We won’t even enjoy ourselves the least bit. That’s the way people do when they’re mad at each other. If I were a kid, or if we were medium-close relatives, I’d say all right—but we’re two grown men.”
“I get it.” Colbie put a grin on his face.
“Good!” Deverel exclaimed. “Now where are we, Colbie? Near the top again. There’s the rim, too!”
It was true. The rim was there—but it was not the same section of the rim from which they had dropped. Deverel realized it. That mountain, that landmark, did not show up against the rim. They had gone across the mirror twice. By common sense, they should have returned to their starting point. But had they returned, Deverel would have been startled indeed.
They came to the apex of the second trip across—and dropped back, once more missing it by an additional ten vertical feet. Once more they plunged downward into the depths of the shining bowl.
On the way down, Colbie was silent. Unable to help himself, his thoughts began to revolve. How could they get out? But his thoughts revolved futilely. He was unable to look at the matter objectively. Had he been solving a puzzle on paper, the answer would have come soon enough. He was well enough equipped on the laws of motion to have solved it. But, being a part of the brain-teaser himself, he was helpless.
But undoubtedly he should have noticed that the position of the stars in the heavens never changed.
They passed bottom, went sloping upward again, in a monotony of evenly decreasing speed that was maddening, at least to Colbie.
Deverel was not silent. He occupied himself in a frivolous manner, talking, laughing, cracking jokes. He enjoyed himself thoroughly. He could make himself at home anywhere, and in the strangest circumstances. It was one of his admirable qualities.
Finally he called, “How about it, Lieutenant? Making any headway?”
Colbie came out of it. “Know less than I did before,” he admitted sadly. The light of the stars, and the light which the mirror so faithfully threw back into space, were beginning to irritate him, too.
“Damn shame.” Deverel sounded regretful. “I’ve got a lot of dope on this strange vale o’ paradise,” he added sadly, “but I can’t find the missing link that’d put it to some advantage. And to be frank, the time to put it to the best advantage will be in less than an hour. A crucial moment, I mean.” He was staring intently at Colbie.
“Damn the crucial moment,” Colbie said coldly.
“Well, there’ll be several crucial moments,” Deverel said, laughing softly. “The best possible times for us to get out—but I don’t know yet how we’ll get out. You say I have to do the thinking? But it won’t hurt if we talk things over a little, will it?”
Colbie said it was all right with him. After all, the whole thing was up to Deverel from now on. No number of solutions would help if Deverel didn’t give in.
They discussed the color of the strange substance. Did it have one? No, certainly not; it absorbed no light, hence was the color of any light it reflected. Could they, as a single system of two bodies, change their direction of motion? No. They were a closed system, and as such had a single center of gravity which would continue on its present course forever, unless some outside force intervened. They could jerk, they could squirm, but for every action in one direction, there would be equal reaction in the other. Was this substance either hot or cold as determined by human senses? No. For it could absorb no heat, nor could it, therefore, transmit heat. The first would convey the impression of coldness, the second that of warmth-
It was an amusing subject, and exhaustless. But Deverel plucked no fruit from its many branches. They were still hopelessly marooned within the bowl of the incredible mirror.
They hit the apex of the third swing across the great mirror—and fell downward again. They bounced back up from the bottom, zoomed upward through the sea of luminescence, fell downward again the fifth time.
And Deverel said, “It’s coming. It’s here. The first Crucial Moment. But we have to pass it up.”
The sixth apex dwindled away, found Deverel looking longingly at the sharply rising mountain which he had placed in his head as a landmark, “the place they had to get back to.”
“I know when we have to get out,” he told Colbie anxiously, “but the how of it knocks me! Every trip across we take, we fall nearer the bottom by ten feet. Right now we’re about sixty feet below the plane of the rim of the mirror. How are we going to rise that sixty feet?”
“You have me there,” said Colbie nonchalantly.
Deverel regarded him seriously. Colbie was an uncaring idiot—didn’t seem to give a damn whether they got out or not. But Deverel was beginning to feel whole new quantities of respect for the IP man. There was certainly more to him than he had hitherto suspected. He smiled. “Still holding out?”
Colbie said he was.
“Well, you know I won’t give in.” Deverel said harshly, “I’m supposed to be damned fool enough to think my way back to Earth with you, back to jail. I’ve outbluffed better men than you, Colbie, and I’ll stick this one out, too. Are we going to be damned fools? You know, if this was off my mind, I could devote myself a lot better to the one problem that fuddles me up.”
But Colbie said that he was sorry he couldn’t help the outlaw get the suspense off his mind. And Deverel’s teeth closed with a snap. Colbie, looking at the hard sardonic features, wondered vaguely, perhaps with a slight inward shudder, what would be the outcome of it all.
Then ensued utter weariness. For interminable minute after interminable minute, they swept dizzyingly down and up through the pressing, aching mist of light. Their eyes became tortured, their brains became inflamed, their muscles stiffened, their nerves jangled. They became irritable and touchy. The monotony was man-killing, especially in view of the fact that the manner of their salvation was yet a thing of the future—or perhaps a thing of no solution.
Deverel was up against a blank wall, and his every word had a snarl in it. “There’s some way it can be done,” he insisted, as they were dropping down after the tenth plunge across the great mirror. “And I have to find it soon. We’re a hundred feet below the rim now. You could help me, Colbie —you’ve the brains for it, I know you have. But you’re lazy, damn it. You insist on sitting back there and letting me do all the thinking. Suggest something, won’t you?”
Colbie answered seriously, “Deverel, I have been thinking. But it’s no good. What is it you know? What strange characteristics has the mirror got that both you and I don’t already know?” He paused, shaking his head. “I can’t see the trees for the forest—I’ll admit it.” He was genuinely sorry he couldn’t help, and was more than a little touched by the outlaw’s desperate search for the final link in the chain he had evidently fabricated. “Why not tell me what it’s all about?” he suggested. “Maybe I can go on from what you’ve found out.”
“No sale!” Deverel snorted angrily. “What I know is my trump card— you’d know as much as I do. Wouldn’t do me any good.”
“Won’t do you any good, anyway—unless you give in.” Colbie grinned easily.
“And you can bet everything you’ve got I won’t!” Deverel snapped. And then looked queerly at Colbie. “You really have made up your mind, haven’t you?” he demanded. He shrugged his shoulders sulkily. “But maybe you’ll change it. That’s what I’m banking on, anyway. You’re not the type that can hold out forever.”
Colbie shrugged his own shoulders in indifference, and then crossed his legs a different way. Thinking better of it, he lay flat on his back, and by virtue of swinging his arms one way and his legs the other, started to whirl about. Elsewhere, the action might have seemed childish, but here it was one of a strictly limited number of amusements.
While this aimless gyration, which, once started, continued unabated, may have amused Colbie at first, it very soon had a much different effect. Abruptly he sat up—still spinning lazily—and stared at Deverel. A slow grin appeared on his lips, went into temporary eclipse as he turned around, and appeared again as the rope holding them together wound up about him. “Your difficulty,” he asked judiciously, “lies in being unable to make up for that hundred feet or so we’ve lost to friction, I take it?”
Deverel looked at him keenly and nodded.
Colbie’s face split in a slow, broad grin. “I haven’t got it all figured out. I said I’d let you do that. But I know how to make up for that difference. It takes cooperation, and maybe if you know how to do it, you’ll give me the rest of that information sooner. Because I won’t cooperate till you do. You think what I was doing, and you’ll get it.”
Deverel looked at him blankly. Then—”I’ve got it!” he gurgled. “I knew it could be done—and it’s easy!”
He was talking rapidly, excitedly. “I’ve got the whole thing worked out, now. Everything I need! It’s only a question of waiting. Two or three more times across the mirror— Now listen,” he went on rapidly. “You have to tell me it’s all right. This’ll get us out, both of us. You will, won’t you?” he demanded anxiously.
Then he saw Colbie’s mask of a face and shouted furiously, “Don’t be a damned fool, Colbie! You don’t want to die, do you? You know you won’t be able to stand death from lack of water and food—you know it! Now’s the time to make up your mind.” He was feverish.
“I made up my mind quite a while ago,” Colbie pointed out. “If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have contributed your clinching link just now.”
Deverel laughed harshly. “You’re going to stick with it,” he jeered. “You’re going to let a principle kill you! Well, I’m going to let it kill me, too—and I’m not as scared of death as you are. In fact, it’d be better if I did die; I’ve got too much hell in store for me, one way and another. So I don’t really care. How do you like that?” he ripped out savagely.
“It’s all right with me—I always knew you didn’t give much of a damn about anything, Deverel.” He smiled disarmingly.
Deverel regarded him in blank amazement, an amazement that swiftly turned into sheer, obvious admiration. Until that moment, Deverel had doubted that Colbie was sure of his intentions; now he knew it, and the knowledge gave him a new picture of Colbie.
Colbie yawned; and then Deverel’s rage apparently broke all bounds. He called Colbie every foul name under the Sun, reviled him with the unprintable verbal scum of innumerable space ports—and then stopped short.
“Hell, I didn’t mean that,” he muttered. He waved a hand. “Sorry—I mean it. It’s just that”—he summoned a grin—”there went the second Crucial Moment. Rather, the minute we drop down from the eleventh apex—there it goes. It’s about a minute away. We’re now, to all intents and purposes, a mean one hundred ten feet below the rim. Phew!”
“What are these crucial moments?” Colbie inquired in genuine bewilderment.
Deverel laughed in amused disgust. “There are several of them—I think. And the more of them we pass up, the more crucial the next one is. Get it? At last we come to the Final Crucial Moment! And after we pass that up—” Deverel shook his head. “After that, there’s no more hope. No more Crucial Moments.” After a while, he said listlessly, “I’ll tell you when they come around.”
They swept down and they swept up. Angles decreased and angles increased. The rim loomed up through the gloom of light, and dropped away. Constant acceleration, followed by just as constant deceleration. And light and still more light and nothing else but light.
Two men against the magical mirror!
Seventeen times the rim dropped away, and each time they approached it was farther away—ten feet higher than before. And then Deverel remarked wearily, “The third Crucial Moment—one hundred seventy feet below the rim.” He cocked an eye—a bleary eye—at Colbie, who was so exhausted and blinded by the incessant play of light from the mirror that he was apathetic. “What are you thinking about?”
“Just waiting,” Colbie returned tiredly, “for you to give the word!”
Deverel laughed harshly. “And I’ll never give it. Listen. In less than an hour comes the—”
“The fourth Crucial Moment,” put in Colbie acidly.
“Wrong. The final.” He waited for this to take effect, but it had none at all. Then he snarled, “You’re going to hold out—good Lord!” For a moment he was speechless, glaring at the other man. Then unaccountably, he laughed. “We’re two of a kind—two stubborn fools. I didn’t know you had it in you,” he remarked frankly. “I really believe you’re going to—” and he broke off.
“That I’m going to hold out past the time that really means something to us?” Colbie asked him quizzically. He nodded slowly.
Deverel sank back in disgust.
They topped the eighteenth, the nineteenth, the twentieth apex. Deverel was jumpy, irritated. “About half an hour,” he said nervously. “That’s all we’ve got. I mean it. When that time goes, then we kiss life good-bye. I wish you’d see reason, Colbie. Either we both die—or I go free, and you live, too, and we’re just as if we never came to this planet. Just think of that—life again!”
Deverel watched Colbie intently, but the IP man was absolutely unaffected. The outlaw had been hoping against hope that Colbie would, in the last vital moments, give in. He had determined to wait that long, just on the chance. Now that chance was definitely out, and Deverel had to play a card he had long ago decided to use if worse came to worse. It might win—and it might lose.
So in the next few moments—with the verve and ability of a natural actor (he had played Hamlet when he was a younger man)—he increased his nervousness, the desperation of his manner, the snarl in his voice.
“Twenty-five minutes, Colbie. Give us plenty of time.” Colbie was obdurate. They were on the twenty-second trip across. Deverel’s rasping voice went on later, “Twenty minutes. And here comes the rim.”
The rim came toward them, slowly. More and more slowly, and then gently started dropping away. The twenty-third trip.
“Fifteen minutes, Colbie.” Deverel’s voice had the rasp of a buzz saw in it. He was actually nervous now. The amount of time was pretty small. So that suddenly he said in a tone of voice that was deprived of every trace of moisture, “Colbie.”
Colbie met his eyes, and what he saw there made his own open wider.
“You guessed it, Colbie.” The outlaw’s tone was dull. He spread his hands. “I’m done. I’ve cracked. Good Lord!” he burst out. “You don’t give a damn! That’s what gets me—I can’t understand it. Listen—you may think I’m scared to die, that I’m not the kind of fellow I’ve painted myself to be—but I am. I’m careless with my life. I won’t care at all when my number’s due. What I can’t stand is the fact that it isn’t due! There’s a way out. And it’s only your stubborn refusal that’s blocking the way. But I guess when you come down to it, it’s me—”
“It’s I—” Colbie corrected mildly.
“It’s I that’s blocking the way. So I give up. You win. You’re the world-beater of this crowd. You’re the champion holder-outer, the prince of don’t-give-a-damners! Colbie, you’ve got me in tears. Honest, I feel like blubbering like a kid. I can’t understand you—sitting there—” he groped.
The IP man regarded Deverel steadily. “You’re funny,” he muttered. “I knew you’d give in, just because of that. You have dash—impulsiveness— a quick love of life. I’m just a stolid space-cop.”
And Deverel suddenly thrust out his jaw angrily. “I gave in, didn’t I? And don’t think I haven’t got half a notion to take it back. I’m capable of it.” His eyes challenged the other’s.
Colbie said slowly, “No. Don’t do it—forget it. We were fools—you decided not to be one. That’s all there is to it.” Once more he met the eyes of the other man, this time thoughtfully, then he nodded his head in slow determination. His head came up, and a sparkle entered his eyes.
“What do we do?” he demanded. “Spill it—let’s get out of this forsaken place. I don’t like the lighting arrangements! Come on!”
Deverel went into action.
“Wind yourself up on this rope,” his voice cracked out, full of the energy of real desperation now. “Closer—come on! All right.” He braced his feet against Colbie, and pushed. Colbie went whirling dizzily away, the rope uncoiling. He came to the end of the rope. Deverel then pulled in such a manner that he utilized to the fullest extent Colbie’s rotatory motion. Colbie came spinning back, winding up. Deverel lashed out with his feet. Colbie unwound again, this time in a new direction. Time after time he came back, whirled away again. Deverel manipulated Colbie in the same way a small boy does a certain toy called the jo-jo.
Swiftly, each was swinging around the other in an ellipse with a shifting axis.
“Get it?” panted Deverel. “We’ve got a circular motion started. It isn’t affecting our course in the slightest, though. We’re a closed system. For every action a reaction. I’m swinging around you, too. Now, you stop spinning—it isn’t necessary now.” Colbie flailed about with his arms and, in the course of two revolutions, swung around Deverel in a true circle. And all the while they were hurtling up the slope of the mirror, at a rate dictated by no other force than the retarding power of gravity.
Deverel was gasping. “Now—draw up on the rope. Pulls us nearer the center of the circle we’re making and we go faster—our angular velocity increases. Now we’re going.”
And they were. By dint of prodigious exertions, they worked their angular velocity up to such a point that the centrifugal force was putting a terrific strain on their laboring lungs.
And finally the outlaw gasped, “Enough! We’re going plenty fast. If we go any faster, we’ll split wide open. We’d keep on whirling like this until the slight bit of friction wore it down—that is, if we didn’t use it to escape this trap. And we’re going to use it, too! The rim should be along in —two minutes, seventeen seconds flat. Oh, yes, I figured that out to the hair’s breadth.”
Suddenly he was shouting out loud, “And there it is—the rim! Now, look, honest to God, I don’t know which of us is going over.” His eyes feverishly watched the approach of the rim, whenever it swung into his line of vision. It was etched against the mountains. Throbbing seconds beat away into the past. Colbie’s pulses were hammering. How often afterward he thought of the snapping suspense the looming mirror engendered in him then! It was like a monster—mysterious and brutal. Deverel’s voice came again, “I think it’s going to be you. It has to be you! Yes!
“We’re a closed system, remember. Now say we have an explosion. You fly that way, I fly the other. But we each retain the kinetic energy given us by centrifugal force.”
Cocking a wild, red-rimmed, bleary eye on the approaching rim, he coiled himself up two feet nearer Colbie. They gyrated more swiftly. Colbie shouted in protest.
Deverel snarled, “Can’t help it. The rope has to be parallel to the rim the minute we hit the apex.” He blinked his eyes to get the sweat out, looked at the chronometer above his eyes. Seven seconds to go. Deverel was shuddering—he had so damned many things to do at once. He had to regulate their angular velocity—his timing sense—the sense which tells us how many whole steps we can make to reach a curb exactly—was telling him how many gyrations they would make in order to hang poised, for an infinitesimal second, parallel to the rim. With one hand, he had to extract a razor-sharp knife from an outside space kit. And he had to keep an eye on his chronometer, for he had to know exactly when they reached the apex of this, the twenty-third trip across the great mirror.
And perhaps the greatest miracle of that whole insane adventure was that everything worked itself out just as Deverel was planning. The rope, its human weights swinging dizzily at its ends, came parallel to the mirror’s rim on the exact, nonexisting moment they reached the climb’s apex. And in that exact moment, Deverel slashed at the rope close to where it was fastened about him.
Colbie experienced no change of pace—simply a sudden release of pressure. The operation had been smoothly performed. At the exact moment when they, as a single system, had no upward and no downward motion, Deverel had severed the rope. Colbie simply shot straight toward the rim at the velocity he had been rotating at that particular moment.
He plummeted up the slope of the mirror, gravity now definitely fighting him. He lost twelve feet in upward velocity every second. Would the kinetic energy his body now contained be sufficient to stave off that deadly deceleration? Would gravity whittle it down to zero, somewhere below the rim?
“Colbie,” he gritted, speaking softly to himself, “if you’ve never prayed before, try it now!”
And perhaps the prayers did the trick, or it might have been the computations Deverel’s keen brain worked out. Using the factors of their individual weights on this planet, and the two-hundred-foot length of rope, and the time for one revolution, he had known the approximate kinetic energy each man would develop, had known that Colbie would go over the rim with a liberal margin to spare.
Up past the rim Colbie shot. Over the rim—and up into space. And there, fifty feet above the planet, he stopped rising. The moment of falling was heart-stopping. His spacesuit was tough—but would it stand the strain? He didn’t have much time to theorize about it. He hit, and he hit hard. He felt as if every bone in his body was crushed in the moment before his consciousness faded away.
When he came back to consciousness, he knew a sharp, agonizing pain below the knee of his right leg. “Broken,” he thought dismally, and grimaced as he almost involuntarily tried to move the injured member. He couldn’t move it at all.
Then the thought of Deverel came back. Good Lord, he was still on the mirror!
“Deverel!” he shouted.
A cheery voice came back. “All here and right as rain.” Then the voice became anxious. “What’s wrong? I was trying to get in touch with you.”
“Broken leg, I guess.”
“Hurt?”
“Damnably!” Colbie gritted his teeth.
“I was afraid something like that would happen,” the outlaw answered with sympathy. “I’m sorry it had to be you—I would have taken the rap if we’d have swung around right. But we didn’t. That was my gamble for escape.”
“How are you getting out?” Colbie demanded. Then in sudden panic, “And what if you break a leg?”
“Ho! I’ll get out, and I won’t break a leg either. I have to travel across the mirror, you know, and I’ll lose ten vertical feet. How far did you fall?” he asked anxiously. Colbie told him. “Fine! Not bad at all for a rough calc.”
“You did a fine job all around,” Colbie told him feelingly. “That’s right, you’ll go over the rim, too. You’ve got gravitational and centrifugal force acting on you.”
“Now listen, Colbie, you’re on the wrong part of the rim, d’you know that?”
No, Colbie hadn’t known it. So their ships were on the other side?
“No, not on the other side. About a sixth of the circle of the rim around from where you are.”
“Well, then, where are you bound?”
“For the ships.”
Colbie gasped. “You’re crazy! You’re headed directly opposite from where I am.”
“Oh, no, I’m not,” Deverel sang sweetly. “I’m headed right for a point on the mirror a sixth of its rim removed from you in the direction the planet rotates. Now quit gasping like a fish, and listen to the most gorgeous and unbelievable part of this whole adventure. Do you think we went straight across the mirror?”
“Certainly!”
“We didn’t! Now here’s the bombshell—” He paused, and then said, “We were the hob of a pendulum!”
“What?” Colbie shouted it in dismay. “Lord, Deverel, you’re crazy, crazy as a loon! A pendulum! We weren’t hanging from anything, from a string, or cable or—Lord!”
“Getting it?” The voice was sympathetic. “Don’t you see? We were a pendulum. And the beautiful part was that we didn’t need to hang from anything so we could vibrate. A string, or something like that, would have ruined the effect entirely. As it is, we were a perfect, simple pendulum, the which that has, so far, existed only in theory! See, there wasn’t any friction, and there was a perfect vacuum. There was just gravity. It pulled us down and up and down and up and down and up. And there was a force which wouldn’t let us travel in any path except a perfect curve, the path a pendulum takes!
“And what is so characteristic of the pendulum? Why, the periods of vibration are the same! Do you think that knowledge didn’t come in handy when I wanted to know to the dot, exactly when we’d reach the apex? You bet it did! And then there’s something else about a pendulum —I’m surprised you didn’t notice. At the Earth’s pole the plane of vibration of a pendulum turns around once every twenty-four hours, in a direction opposite to that at which the Earth rotates. Rather, it appears that way. Actually, it is the Earth that turns around under the pendulum! And that’s what happened to us. Didn’t you notice that the stars as a whole never changed positions all during the time we were on the mirror? They didn’t. We were a pendulum. The plane of our vibration was fixed in relation to space. This crazy planet revolved around under us because there wasn’t any friction to say ‘no’! So I figured it out diagrammatically—right! In my head! And if you think that wasn’t a brain-twister—!
“I timed the first two or three vibrations after this pendulum stuff came up and hit me. I found each trip across took seventeen minutes, forty-five and four-tenths seconds. And I knew the period of rotation of this planet —fifty-two minutes, twenty-five and a fraction seconds. Notice anything about those figures, any general relation?”
“I get it,” Colbie replied. He was sweating. His leg felt numb from the hip down. “One vibration took about one-third as long as the planet takes to make a revolution.”
“Exactly! I’ll keep talking, Colbie, help you forget the leg. And not only that, but the bottom of the mirror is a pole of the planet! So we were a true pendulum, vibrating at a planet’s pole. And the length of our ‘string,’ the radius of the sphere, of which the mirror is a part, was out in space about sixteen hundred miles!
“Now in our vibrations, we always went through the center of the mirror, but we never went across to the other side. That is, one swing always began and ended in one-half the mirror. In relation to space, our plane of vibration was always the same; in relation to the mirror, it was a curve which crept round the mirror, touching the rim six times.
“I had the devil of a time!” Deverel exclaimed. “I had to formulate a law which would tell me absolutely where each vibration would end, on the mirror, and thus how many times we’d have to swing across before we got back to our starting point—our original starting point. And finally I got this: One swing from rim to rim ends at that point on the rim which is opposite its starting point at end of swing. Get it? Well, if you don’t, draw a diagram of a circle divided into six sixty-degree wedges—and follow the law out.” And Colbie actually did draw such a diagram later. “In other words, it took us six swings from rim to rim to bring us back to our starting point. Those were the Crucial Moments. If we’d have got out at the wrong places, Colbie, we’d have starved before we traveled the distance back to the ships—if we knew where they were. Then, too, there was a chance one of us would end up pretty badly hurt! And one of us did—you had to drop back further than I’ll have to.
“And that’s all there is to it. I let you out at the end of the twenty-third trip from rim to rim. I’m getting out at the end of the twenty-fourth—what I really believe would have been the Final Crucial Moment. We couldn’t have developed enough centrifugal force to send us over the rim if we’d gone around the mirror six more times, and fallen, as a consequence, sixty additional feet farther away from it. How’s your leg?” he inquired.
“Rotten!” Colbie muffled a groan.
“Keep your chin up!” Deverel snapped. “Seven minutes and I’ll be over the rim, and I’ll hotfoot it back to the ships. It may take several hours before I get back here,” he added in anxiety.
“I’ll be all right,” Colbie mumbled.
In the next few hours they kept in constant touch. Deverel made the rim, landed unharmed. He set off across the gouged plateau with both speed and care. He made the ships unharmed; and less than fifteen minutes later, the most beautiful sight in the world for Colbie was the sight of that slim, black IPF cruiser as it came zooming above Cyclops straight toward him.
It landed. Deverel stepped out. He picked Colbie up in his strong arms, carried him inside the ship, took off his spacesuit, and bared his broken leg. It was a simple fracture, and was still in a healthy condition. Deverel went to work on it, put it in splints after having given it a wrench which accomplished the dual purpose of sending Colbie into a faint and setting the broken bone. Deverel put it in splints, and then bundled the IP man into bed.
* * * *
Six weeks later, when Colbie was able to hobble around on a makeshift crutch, Deverel was still there.
“You make a nice nurse,” Colbie told him over a meal one day. “Thanks a lot.”
“Skip it!” The outlaw grinned. “You weren’t such a bad nurse yourself. I’d have been gone before now if you hadn’t stepped in.” He gulped a cup of coffee. “You’re well enough, I figure,” he said uneasily. “‘Bout time to go?”
Thoughtfully, uneasily, Colbie said, “Sure—I guess it is.”
So that the next day Deverel sat down at the controls and touched them lightly. The ship shot upward into the eternal night of Cyclops, zoomed feather-light out over the strangest, most magical mirror ever to exist. And Colbie, looking at it, knew that he would always think of it with more affection than fear. He would always think of it as a child’s colossal toy. It had so many amusing characteristics that he halfway felt it’d be a pleasure to go zooming down its infinitely smooth surface once again.
A dream world, he thought, if there ever was one.
Once landed near Colbie’s ship, the outlaw said sardonically, “I guess we transfer from this ship to yours?”
Colbie met his eyes seriously for a moment, then got up from where he was sitting, and limped back and forth in the close confines of the cabin.
His teeth were set, his eyes frowning, his fists opening and closing. He sat down again and got up. The look on his face was almost savage.
Suddenly he waved a hand violently, and a snarl contorted his features. He swung around, looking at the outlaw with hot, gray eyes. “I can’t do it!” he snapped. He shoved out his jaw. “Not after what we’ve been through. Damn it, Deverel,” he panted, “I don’t like this job. I feel too friendly for you. I like you too damn much. You’re a real guy. Hell, you could have run out any time you wanted to in the past six weeks.
“No. No, I can’t do it. It’d be like”—he groped—”like taking unfair advantage, somehow. So,” he said bitterly, “you’re free.” He forced a smile onto his face. “I’ll write it in my report like this—Captured outlaw, but he put one over on me and escaped.’”
“Right,” Deverel agreed steadily.
“So I’ll be going. I’ll be here for, oh, about twenty-four hours. You going any place in particular?” he inquired politely.
“No-o-o,” Deverel replied thoughtfully. “Don’t know as I have any particular destination. Drop you a postcard? I will, if you think you need me for anything.”
“Don’t bother. I never have much trouble finding you,” Colbie said airily. Then he put on a spacesuit. Deverel worked the valves, and a moment later Colbie stood in the air-lock. For a moment, the two men stood there, saluting each other with grave eyes. Then the inner door closed and the outer opened.
Deverel watched Colbie enter his ship.
Then he sat down and, incandescent gases flaring from her stern jets, the slim cruiser accelerated until it was swallowed up in the trackless, illimitable wastes of space.