Айзек Азимов - Before The Golden Age

“Now why did they make the mirror? Only reason I can see—power. They must have had a heat engine. It generated power in huge amounts, undoubtedly, and perhaps the power they took in that way was broadcast back to their planet. Or perhaps it was a weapon—another mirror, plane this time, which could rotate and train a searing beam of heat on an enemy ship. Would that ship blister! And they might have been able to rotate this satellite at will, too-

“Then something happened. Those people lost their satellite. Maybe their own planet exploded. Maybe their sun exploded, and this planet went shooting away, and finally our Sun grabbed it.

“And that’s a fair explanation—the only one, as far as I see. Unless, of course, it was meant to be something that was in the experimental stage and was never completed.”

“The magical mirror,” Colbie interspersed softly. But neither of them then knew exactly what magical characteristics it did possess.

For a moment they were silent. “Well”—Deverel had a shrug in his voice —”we can’t do anything now—can we? Shall we eat?”

“Why not?”

They ate in the strange manner necessitated by spacesuits. By buttons in a niche outside their suits they manipulated levers which reached into a complicated mechanism, pulling out food pills—tasteless things—and water, which they sucked through a tube.

“Now,” said Deverel, smacking his lips as if he had just eaten a square meal, “this is just another situation, and not a fairy tale. Proved it by eating, which is so mortal it’s disgusting. Where we bound?”

“For the bottom—”

“Ho—not at all! We’re almost at bottom now—notice how the angle’s been straightening out? It’s almost 180° now. Let’s see. Phew!” He had looked at his chronometer. “We’ve fallen three hundred miles in something like eight or nine minutes.” Colbie started to protest, but the outlaw said, “Sure, to all intents and purposes we’ve simply fallen three hundred miles —the depth of the mirror. Remember, there isn’t any friction that’d hold us back, and the inclined surface we came down on just guided us. And that means we’re going to bounce right back to the other rim—see?”

“Ye gods, yes!” yelled Colbie, then grimaced. “But we won’t quite reach the rim. Just that damnably small amount of friction will hold us back fifty or some feet. If there weren’t any friction things would be simple— we’d reach the other rim exactly.”

“Sure. And climb over. Gravity gave us the momentum going down, but she’ll occupy herself taking it away at the same rate going up.”

While they had been talking, they had passed bottom—quite definitely. They were going up, for the angle was slowly but surely increasing.

“We won’t make it,” Colbie said disconsolately. “There’s the rub.”

In the thoughtfully melancholy voice of the Danish prince, Deverel muttered, “Aye, there’s the rub; for in that sleep of death, what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause.”

“And that’s appropriate, isn’t it!” Colbie sneered.

“I played Hamlet once. Long time ago, of course, but I was pretty good. You know that second act scene where he—”

“Skip it! Forget it—I don’t want to hear it. Let’s get on. There is the friction—infinitesimal. It doesn’t help at all when you try to change or retard your motion; but in the long run, it’ll build up a total resistance great enough to keep us from the rim.”

“Check, check, and check,” agreed the outlaw, touching the fingers of his left hand with the index finger of his right.

“That’s our situation. Looks hopeless.”

“Maybe,” Deverel declared. “Let me add some further facts. We’re dropping down at an acceleration of twelve feet a second per second. At bottom, three hundred miles down, we had a terrific final velocity. Don’t know exactly what it is, but there’s a formula for it. Going up, gravity will be right on our tails, lopping off twelve feet of speed for every second. Notice I say up and down. I mean it. Our angular speed is something else again, and is certainly much greater.”

Then, as he saw Colbie’s impatient look, “I don’t know how we get out. Normally, when you get in some place, you go out the same way—but they closed the door on us. And, of course, I don’t see how we can change direction.”

The IP man crossed his legs under him the other way for a change. He squinted upward. “Getting near top again. Damn that light. After a while, I’ll go blind.”

“Shut your eyes,” Deverel told him callously, then, “Lord,” he remarked whimsically, his cynical, yet friendly, eyes crinkling. “I’m glad we’re what we are, Colbie. You have to chase me and I always feel obliged to run. Then we ran into the most interesting experiences. I’ve had plenty of good times looting canal boats on Mars—did I ever tell you how hard it was squeezing the rings off the Empress’ fingers? I used plenty of soap and water—and she was horrified at the way I wasted the water—but somehow I’m glad they got after me. And you are, too,” he added as if in self-defense.

“Sure,” Colbie remarked. “But in a way I’m not. You’re a likeable fellow. I admit it. But you haven’t got the instinct to help make an organized unit of society—you’re a gear out of mesh. ‘Course, there’s others like you—but it’s you I have to take in. I suppose I’ll do it, too.”

“Forgetting the mix-up we’re in?”

“No. Just trying to match your own superb confidence in crises like this one.”

“Touché” The outlaw grinned. “Any ideas to match your confidence?”

“Not a shard.”

“Me either—yet. By the way”—and here Deverel regarded Colbie thoughtfully—”I’m keeping anything I learn to myself—anything that might get us out, I mean.”

“Meaning?” Colbie’s eyes hardened.

“I’ll sell what I know for a price.”

“Ho! Freedom, I guess!” Colbie said sardonically.

“Well—not that, exactly. I’ll tell you what it is, if I ever get anything to sell.”

Colbie studied him, shrugged his shoulders carelessly. He looked over his shoulder, but he didn’t see the approaching rim.

“Our angle’s much steeper.” Deverel followed his thought. “The rim isn’t far away. Couple minutes yet.”

“We won’t make it though,” Colbie said regretfully, “unless there’s something else we don’t know anything about”

In a few minutes, they saw the rim outlined against the black sides of an uneven mountain range which might have been set back from the rim anywhere from ten to twenty miles. They regarded its stubborn approach with anxiety.

So slowly it came toward them—and so rapidly their velocity was being decreased to the zero point! Nerves tensed, fists clenched, eyes strained. But intuitively, rather than from any deliberate mental calculation, they felt that they would not reach it. Their velocity was simply not enough.

And it wasn’t. Slowly—compared to their earlier enormous velocities— they rose toward the rim which was so painfully near, yet so infinitely difficult to reach. One moment, then, they were rising; the next, falling. There had been no pause, or if there had been it was nestled close to that infinitesimal space of time which man will never measure. They began to fall.

In a voice that held words of chagrin—true to human nature, he had not given up hope—Colbie said, “Missed it—by about ten vertical feet, as a close guess. Next time we swing across this damned mirror we’ll miss it by twenty feet.”

“Something like that,” Deverel agreed abstractedly. At the moment they had fallen, he had noted the time down to the exact fraction of a second. And he kept it in mind. Not that he had any idea of its ultimate benefit then, but he felt it might be a good thing to know. “Let’s see,” he was muttering to himself, and using Colbie’s phrase, went on, “the time for one swing across—”