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ElapticAI-512

Dataset card Data Studio Files
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to do? How shall we get out of here?"
Hank said, "Same way we come in. We blast out."
"But I've tried that, Hank," Biggs defended. "Before I realized the
full extent of our situation. And nothing happened. There's something
strange in the response of the motors. Don't ask me what. It's hard to
say, when the Saturn is plunging into beaconless, starless nothing.
But stepped-up acceleration is just a waste of fuel."
"Yeah?" mused Hank. "That's queer. Now, I wonder why "
At that instant came a most unexpected interruption. Todd, who had been
quietly tending his controls, suddenly came to life with a startled cry.
"Well, I'll be Biggs! Captain Hanson!"
"Yes?" Both men answered at once.
"There there's a large body before us!"
He pressed a button. A glassy pane above the panel glowed into
life. As if a portion of the Saturn's prow had been sheared away,
I was looking at the vista before us. But it was no longer empty
as, according to Biggs, it had been ever since the moment of the
"accident." The stark, gray loneliness was relieved now by a monstrous
pockmark in space. A giant sphere, imponderably distant, but definitely
on our trajectory!
Hanson was a man of action, I learned. He leaped to the
intercommunicating system.
"Chief Garrity! Large body for'rd! Reverse hypes and apply drag
instantly. Todd, plot a course revision! Man! What a monster! Biggs,
get out the charts. Something solid at last. Maybe we've busted back
into our own universe!"
Biggs said, "Yes, sir! Right away, sir!" His eyes questioned Hank. But
Cleaver shook his head.
"Nope, I don't think so. It ain't logical. That's a phenom a phenom a
pee-culiarity o' the cockeyed universe we're in Hey! What's goin' on
here?"
The constant hum of the hypatomic motors below, one I had hardly
noticed until suddenly it no longer throbbed in my ears, had subtly
altered. A brief instant of silence, a jarring concussion and a
deeper, more resonant sound.
Biggs explained, "That's the hypatomics being thrown into reverse.
Anti-grav units are activated in the nose of the ship, then when we
get the course variation we swing around our objective. Common space
practice, Hank."
"That's what," said Hank dubiously, "I figgered. Is it common space
practice to make a beeline for danger, though, like Billy-be-damned?"
And he pointed to the visiplate. Biggs' eyes followed his finger and
Biggs gasped.
"Great whirling comets! It's got us caught!"
For despite the mounting clamor of the reversed engines, despite the
anti-gravitational units of which Biggs had boasted, despite the
swiftly redoubled orders and efforts of a shocked Captain Hanson the
Saturn's speed had definitely increased!
The figure in the plate was looming larger moment by moment, and
even to my untrained eye it was plain that we were slam-banging,
hell-for-leather, toward a crackup!
Don't ask me what happened in the next few minutes. I wouldn't know.
It's all one whirling blind spot in my memory. Up till now, this entire
affair had partaken of the nature of a dream. Amusing, not unpleasant,
but quite remote and faintly incredible.
Now, suddenly, I realized it was not a dream. But that I, Jim
Blakeson, publicity representative of Midland U., had somehow been
dragged out of the normal routine of everyday life and thrust into a
wild, impossible adventure in a world three centuries beyond my time.
It was a disturbing awakening. It didn't make matters a bit better
to realize that I was now along with five other twentieth century
exiles in imminent peril of being slapped out of existence by a
gigantic planet that shouldn't be in a dull, gray universe that didn't
exist!
About me, frantic figures boiled and churned. The skipper of the Saturn
was bouncing about the control room like a bipedal gadfly, jerking
switches, bellowing orders, pawing through charts that to me at
least were a complete mystery.
Dick Todd still sat, tense and grim-jawed, in his bucket-shaped pilot's
chair. His fingers played the banked controls before him as the fingers
of an accomplished organist seek stops, but so far as I could see,
his movements availed nothing. For the object in the visiplate loomed