A little silence fell upon the three men and Manning's image.

Greg broke it. "How about your energy collector?" he asked Craven. "Will it maintain the ship out here? You get cosmic rays. Not too much else, I'm afraid."

Craven grinned wryly. "You're right, but we can get along. The acc.u.mulators are practically drained, though, and we won't be able to store anything. Would you mind shooting us over just a little power?

Enough to charge the acc.u.mulators a little for emergency use."

He looked over his shoulder, almost apprehensively.

"There might be an emergency out here, you know. n.o.body knows anything about this place."

"I'll give you a little power," Greg agreed.

"Thank you very much," said Craven, half in mockery. "No doubt you think yourself quite smart, Manning, getting us out here. You know you have us stranded, that we can't collect more than enough power to live on."

"That's why I did it," Greg said, and vanished.

_CHAPTER NINETEEN_

Craven watched the _Invincible_ gather speed and tear swiftly through the black, saw it grow tiny and then disappear entirely, either swallowed by the distance or snapping into the strange super-s.p.a.ce that existed beyond the speed of light.

He turned from the window, chuckling.

Stutsman snarled at him: "What's so funny?"

The scientist glared at the wolfish face and without speaking, walked to the desk and sat down. He reached for pencil and paper.

Chambers walked over to watch him.

"You've found something, Doctor," he said quietly.

Craven laughed, throatily. "Yes, I have. I've found a lot. Manning thinks he can keep us out here, but he's wrong. We'll be in the Solar System less than a week after he gets there."

Chambers stifled a gasp, tried to speak calmly. "You mean this?"

"Of course I mean it. I don't waste my time with foolish jokes."

"You have the secret of material energy?"

"Not that," the scientist growled, "but I have something else as valuable. I have the secret of Manning's drive: I know what it is that enables him to exceed the speed of light ... to go ten thousand times as fast as light ... the Lord knows how much faster if he wanted to."

"No ordinary drive would do that," said Chambers. "It would take more than power to make a ship go that fast."

"You bet your life it would, and Manning is the boy who's got it. He uses a s.p.a.ce field. I think I can duplicate it."

"And how long will it take you to do this work?"

"About a week," Craven told him. "Perhaps a little longer, perhaps a little less. But once we go, we'll go as fast as Manning does. We'll be short on power, but I think I can do something about that, too."

Chambers took a chair beside the desk. "But do we know the way home?"

"We can find it," said Craven.

"But there are no familiar constellations," objected Chambers. "He dragged us out so far that there isn't a single star that any one of us can identify."

"I said I'd find the Solar System," Craven declared impatiently, "and I will. Manning started out for it, didn't he? I saw the way he went. The Sun is a type G star and all I'll do is look for a type G star."

"But there may be more than one type G star," objected the financier.

"Probably are," Craven agreed, "but there are other ways of finding the Sun and identifying it."

He volunteered no further information, went back to work with the pad and pencil. Chambers rose wearily from his chair.

"Tell me when you know what we can do," he said.

"Sure," Craven grunted.

"That's the Sun," said Craven. "That faint star between those two brighter ones."

"Are you sure of it?" demanded Stutsman.

"Of course. I don't make blunders."

"It's the only type G star in that direction," suggested Chambers, helpfully.

"Not that, either," declared Craven. "In fact, there are several type G stars. I examined them all and I know I'm right."

"How do you know?" challenged Stutsman.

"Spectroscopic examination. That collector field of ours gathers energy just like a burning gla.s.s. You've seen a burning gla.s.s, haven't you?"

He stared at Stutsman, directing the question at him.

Stutsman shuffled awkwardly, unhappily.

"Well," Craven went on, "I used that for a telescope. Gathered the light from the suns and a.n.a.lyzed it. Of course it didn't act like a real telescope, produce an image or anything like that, but it was ideal for spectroscopic work."

They waited for him to explain. Finally, he continued:

"All of the stars I examined were just type G stars, nothing else, but there was a difference in one of them. First, the spectroscope showed lines of reflected light pa.s.sing through oxygen and hydrogen, water vapor and carbon dioxide. Pure planetary phenomena, never found on a star itself. Also it showed that a certain per cent of the light was polarized. Now remember that I examined it for a long time and I found out something else from the length of observation which convinces me.

The light varied with a periodic irregularity. The chronometers aren't working exactly right out here, so I can't give you any explanation in terms of hours. But I find a number of regularly recurring changes in light intensity and character ... and that proves the presence of a number of planetary bodies circling the star. That's the only way one could explain the fluctuations for the G-type star is a steady type. It doesn't vary greatly and has no light fluctuations to speak of. Not like the Cepheid and Mira types."

"And that proves it's our Sun?" asked Chambers.