ER 13

The dust-cloud was farther away than Ato had guessed. Long before they
reached it, his instruments began to waver.

He looked at a star-map. Meanwhile, Nea fed rows of figures into a humming
calculator.

"We'll never make it this way," Ato said. "Not even the emergency storage
would help us. Here," he pointed to a pinpoint of light upon the map. "A
white star. We can reach it, I think."

Nea sighed. "That dust-cloud is beyond our calculations. We should
be nearly there, but it's still far-off. I think it is shrinking and
expanding. At the same time it's dashing off into space at a terrific
rate of speed. You'll have to swing toward that star, Ato. I'll try to
probe the cloud some more. My father would have liked this problem--"

"I don't like the problem at all--" Gunnar complained. "Just where is Grim
Hagen?"

"He must be having as much trouble beating his way to that dust-cloud as we
are," Ato assured him. And then, doubtfully, he added. "But he has more
energy. The Old Space Ship was sitting there below Aldebaran for years and
years. He surely took advantage of the time to replenish his fuel. All the
while, we were using ours up in an effort to find him."

* * * * *

Jack Odin's science did not go far enough to pursue the conversation. He
knew that their power was something like a solar battery. When in gear, the
current that went through the "frame" of the hour-glass-shaped craft turned
it into a huge blob of plasma, a miniature nebula, and hurled it into
space. As for the Fourth Drive, he hadn't the slightest idea how it worked.
Ato had said that the scientists who developed it were not sure--just as
men had developed generators long before they knew the laws that governed
them. Ato had a theory that the Fourth Gear slid the ship from plane to
plane. If a bug were crawling along a million mile spiral of wire, he might
go on until he died before getting anywhere--but if he simply lumbered
across the intervening space to the next coil, would he have traveled a
short distance, or a million miles? Ato had also told Odin that the ship
took energy from the gravitational field that it created when traveling at
tremendous speeds, so that the motors were 99% efficient.

Ato set a course for the distant star, and in a short while it was looming
upon the screen with sheets of atomic flame leaping out like the teeth of
a circular saw. One huge explosion flicked a long tongue of