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blacker than coal, and hung it in the beam of sunlight. He started to stick
his hand in, but before the fingers had more than entered he snatched them
back. Almost instantly he had felt the terrific ultra-violet of this light. He
took a stick and a fan, and carefully pushed and blew the can into place. The
grease melted in a few seconds, but stuck in place.
Next he got the water out of the pot. That was difficult, and he got wet doing
it, but he succeeded, and blew it into a sphere in the path of light.
He set to work with his machines, and the pressure cooker. He changed the pan
considerably, and added a small air pump to it. He used power in doing it, but
he was willing to now. He knew he could restore it.
By the time the water was near boiling point he captured it in the rebuilt
pressure cooker, added some tea leaves and let it brew. The beans were hot
too, after he wiped the grease off. With the aid of the pump he was able to
force out his tea when he wished. He gave up hope of making observations that
day. Instead he made an apparatus. It consisted of a heavy fly-wheel (taken
from one of the larger lathes) mounted on a shaft of a small electric motor.
It was so supported that it could be turned in any desired direction.
In two hours he finished it, and moved into the power room with it. The men
had left the room, and six heavy snores and two light ones from the tiers of
bunks explained it.
Atkill set up his crude gyroscope-motor, and began operations. He had to tie
the motor down with pieces of rope. It was slow, laborious work, but at the
end of several hours'he knew that the ship would have stopped its rotation,
and would always face the sun with one side and the back.
He left the device hi operation, and returned to the machine-shop.
In the course of the day he finished his very simple device. He had taken the
motor from one of the power-presses that he no longer could afford to run,
readjusted it, and connected it with a small four-cylinder air-pump. One of
the smaller air-tanks was next worked over, and a quantity of heavy copper
tubing. It ended up as a four-cylinder steam engine running an electric
generator. The air-tank boiler was painted black above, and silvered below. A
flat, closely wound spiral of copper tubing three feet across was similarly
painted. The exhaust from the engine was led to a long copper tube simply laid
down the dark side of the engine room, and emptying into a small tank.
The system was simplicity itself. The sun heated the tank and the coiled pipe.
The steam turned the motor as a generator. The current could be led off to
charge the batteries. He had to charge them half at a tune, for the voltage
given wasn't high esough, of course, to charge the whole bank. But-he had an
unending supply of electric power within the limits of his needs for immediate
life. Air at least they could have.
The men had re-awakened, and again were playing cards. They bothered him very
little, for Texas and Joe Keller kept them away from him. The apparatus was
sufficiently powerful to supply the necessary oxygen, and have power to spare.
But it raised the temperature of the ship a little.
Atkill ate, and went to sleep again.
The next day he began his observations. He continued them the next. The first
day he discovered the secret of the giant sun that seemed to vary in its
power. It did. It was a gigantic Cephid Variable, with a period of little more
than a few hours.
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The days passed swiftly for him. Monotonously for the gangsters. A week went
by. The eternal glaring sun in one spot, the eternal night in others. The
knowledge that they were waiting for certain death, the weird coloring of the
things and the men about them. And above all the monotony. The grinding steady
monotony on men who has never learned to be self-contained.
"Whitey" Moran went mad the fifth day. He shot and killed Tim Farrell, and
wounded Joe Keller before Texas shot him through the ear. He had stolen the
revolver from Joe with consummate cunning.
Keller became delirious from his wound two days later and his mumbling
incoherent talk gave a final push to the tottering reason of "Gink" Castonti.
Castonti succeeded in killing him with a table-knife. Texas prevented his
further murdering. There were only four men left now. Within a week, as Atkill
had predicted, they were reduced to two -Atkill and Texas.
Texas helped Atkill when he could. He helped him with the gruesome work of
disposing of the bodies. There was a refuse lock on the ship. It was meant for
garbage and such waste-and it was six inches in diameter and eighteen inches
long. They had to dispose of the bodies.
The second week Atkill called Texas with a sudden shout that echoed through
the soundless ship in rattling clamour.
"Texl Come here, Tex!" He had seen something that meant their chances of life
were multiplied a thousandfold. And more. In the three-inch telescope on board
Texas saw the dim twilight region of a spinning world flashing with sparkling
lights like a miniature lightning storm on a miniature world. "Uh-storm ain't
it?" Tex was speaking less and less now. He was growing accustomed again to
silence. The silence such as he had known before in open plains.
"No, Tex, it isn't. Dear lad, think a bit. That world is so far away you can't
realize the distance. What kind of lightning would make that big a full?
That's a battle, a battle so big you couldn't even begin to understand it.
It's the size battle half a dozen of these ships would make if they were real
angry-and knew all the things there are to know. Any race that can have a
battle that big has space ships! All we have to do is wait."
"Uh. We've, waited a bit now."
"We're coming nearer to them now. And-every day we're becoming more visible.
We have a gigantic tail now. Hydrogen gas I've released in making our oxygen
is showing up behind us like a comet's tail. They'll investigate if they've
got ships, I swear they must have! That battle is too big."
And curiously, from that time AtkilPs observations became fewer and fewer. He
spent all his time in the machine shop now. Making something. Texas watched
quietly, and played cards. It was evidently a release-flame apparatus-but a
tiny thing. Scarcely larger than a book.
"Be any power in that when you get through?" he asked once.
"Not unless I can get it started somehow after we are picked up. Then about
thirty thousand horsepower. The Flame could give more. A million or so. The
apparatus wouldn't handle it."
Atkill worked on, refining and adding to the tiny mechanism, calculating
fields and effects and building it into the apparatus. He changed the entire
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