The Needed Fuel

The Starshine had a mass of about two hundred tons and an intrinsic velocity of so many miles per second. When the field went on, her mass dropped almost to zero, but her kinetic energy remained the same. Her velocity went up almost to infinity. And the universe went mad.

The vision-ports showed stark lunacy. There were stars, but they were the stars of a madman's dream. They formed and dissolved into nothingness in instants too brief for estimate. For fractions of microseconds they careered upon impossible trajectories across the vision-ports' field of view.

Now a monstrous blue-white sun glared in terribly, seemingly almost touching the ship. An instant later there was utter blackness all about. Then colossal flaring globes ringed in the Starshine, and shriveling heat poured in.

Then there was a blue watery-seeming cosmos all around like the vision of an underwater world and dim shapes seemed to swim in it, and then stars again, and then....

It was stark, gibbering madness!

But Kim reached the instrument-board. With the end of the last morsel of power he had ceased to have weight and had floated clear of the floor and everything else.

By the crazy, changing light he sighted himself and, when he touched a sidewall, flung himself toward the now-dark bank of instruments. He caught hold, fumbled desperately and threw the switch a radiation-relay should have thrown. And then the madness ended.

There was stillness. There was nothing anywhere. There was no weight within the ship, nor light, nor any sound save the heavy breathing of Kim and the Mayor of Steadheim. The vision-ports showed nothing.

Looking carefully, with eyes losing the dazzle of now-vanished suns, one could see infinitely faint, infinitely distant luminosities. The Starshine was somewhere between galaxies, somewhere in an unspeakable gulf between islands of space, in the dark voids which are the abomination of desolation.

There were small clankings aft. The outer airlock door went shut. A little later the inner door opened. And then Kim swam fiercely through weightlessness and clung to Dona, still in her space-suit, unable to speak for his emotion.

The voice of the Mayor of Steadheim arose in the darkness which was the interior of the Starshine—and the outer cosmos for 

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