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"I didn't realize that an inertialess approach would be quite such a terrifying spectacle, or I would have warned you," Rodebush went on. "Yes, thanks to you, the super-ship works as she should, at last. But you had better put on your suits and transfer. You might get your things ready...." "'Things' is good!" Costigan laughed, and Clio giggled sunnily.
In midair the paralyzing ray of the Nevians touched him and he crashed heavily to the crystal floor; and from that floor he looked on in helpless, raging fury while his sweetheart and his captain were carried out of their prison and into a waiting submarine. The Boise Acts But what of the super-ship? What happened after that inertialess, that terribly destructive take-off?
Cleveland flinched involuntarily and seized his arm-rests in a spasmodic clutch as he watched this, the first inertialess space-approach; and even Rodebush, who knew better than anyone else what to expect, held his breath and swallowed hard at the unbelievable rate at which the two vessels were rushing together.
Inertialess now, pausing briefly from time to time to enable the crew to accustom themselves to the new sensations, the Boise pursued the invader; hurtling through the void with a velocity unthinkable. "He was easier to take than I thought he would be," Cleveland grunted, staring into the plate.
"None of us would live long enough to get there. We can't travel inertialess until the repairs are made, so if they can't be made without very much traveling, it's just too bad." "I don't see how we could support our jacks...." The engineer paused, then went on. "If you can't give me Mars or Tellus, how about some other planet? I don't care about atmosphere, or about anything but mass.
Therefore interchange of students and of books was highly desirable. And so on. Thus was signed the Triplanetario-Nevian Treaty of Eternal Peace. Nerado and his two companions were escorted ceremoniously to their vessel, and the Boise took off in an inertialess dash toward earth, bearing the good news that the Nevian menace was no more.
"And yet he's so far away and going so fast that if we keep our inertia on it'll take all day at full drive to overtake him." Cleveland was frankly puzzled. "What to do? Shunt in a potentiometer?" "No, we don't need it." Rodebush turned to the transmitter. "Costigan! We are going to take hold of you with a very light tractor. Don't cut it!" "A tractor inertialess?" Cleveland wondered. "Why not?"
The shrilly screaming motor stopped dead instantly, as though it had had no real momentum, or had been inertialess. Startled, white-faced men looked at Kendall. Buck's eyes were shining with an unholy glee. "Uncertainty!" he shouted. "Uncertainty uncertainty uncertainty, you fools! Don't you see it? All the math it said uncertainty man, man we've got just that uncertainty!"
Sensitive ultra-loops had been swung, and along the indicated line shot Triplanetary's super-ship at a velocity which she had never before even approached; the utterly incomprehensible, almost incalculable velocity attained by inertialess matter, driven through an almost perfect vacuum by the Boise's maximum projector blast a blast which would lift her stupendous normal tonnage against a gravity five times that of earth's!
Why, think, man, if I could control that Uncertainty, I could do anything at all, absolutely anything. It would be a world as unreasonable as a bad dream. Think how unreasonable those manifestations we first got were!" "But can't you get any control at all?" "Very little. Anyway, if I could get inertialess conditions at will, I'd be afraid of them.
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