The Planet of the Dying Sun Read online

  Perry Rhodan

  The Third Power #11

  The Planet of

  the Dying Sun

  THE PLANET OF THE DYING SUN

  by Kurt Mahr

  AN ACE BOOK ACE PUBLISHING CORPORATION

  1120 Avenue of the Americas New York, N.Y. 10036

  Copyright © Ace Books 1972,

  Ace Publishing Corporation

  All Rights Reserved

  Printed in the U.S.A

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  The Planet of the Dying Sun

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  1/ STAR STRIDE

  Strewn on the table in front of Perry Rhodan were the results of multiple measurements, of spectrum analyzes and stellar luminosities.

  In Khrest's opinion, they indicated the position and estimated distance of a star known to Arkonide astrogation and could therefore serve as a point of reference for their orientation.

  The situation was this: Perry Rhodan had ended his mission on Gol, the fourteenth planet of Vega, which was a giant of methane and ammonia measuring three times the diameter of Jupiter and with an abnormal state of gravity prevailing on the surface.

  Rhodan's mission was dedicated to the search for the World of Eternal Life and to finding a further clue on Gol as to its location. His exit from Gol had been strikingly spectacular: the search had been interrupted at the moment of greatest danger by the action of a pulsator, which had transported Perry's three separated groups out into space. He and his crew of three had been at the transmitter station; Major Nyssen and Captain Klein were located about fifty miles away in a disabled vehicle; and, finally, there was the Stardust II, the mighty spherical spaceship of the Arkonides. Men and ship were all reunited at a point in space so far beyond any charted routes that nobody knew where they were.

  The mysterious, powerful pulsator was no more than a speck of dust compared in size to the tremendous volume of the twenty-five hundred foot sphere of the Stardust II and how it had accomplished such a herculean feat was incomprehensible even to the men who possessed encompassing knowledge of physics.

  On the other hand, the phenomenon did not disturb them as much as might have been expected.

  The fifty or sixty stars on the observation screen were quickly analyzed. The data were classified and compared with the star catalogues on board the Stardust.

  Thus it was found that none of the stars under examination bore any similarity whatsoever to the three million in the catalogue—with one exception.

  This special star was Khrest's hope.

  The star had a number of features which coincided with a stellar body in the Magellanic cloud outside the galaxy and known to Arkonide astronomy. It would also have been an explanation for the low density of stars if the position of the Stardust was indeed outside the galaxy itself.

  However, a more thorough examination failed to confirm the assumption. The star singled out in the preliminary investigation exhibited just as many features which disagreed with those of the star catalogued in the Magellanic cloud.

  What worried Khrest—and Rhodan as well, although he refused to admit it— was much more the fact that the star, as most of the others observed, had a fantastic spectrum.

  The theory that a fixed star is a 'black body,' according to Planck's law of radiation, was not questioned by Arkonide science. Thus every fixed star, including the few now seen on the observation screens of the Stardust, could be expected to show a continuous radiation spectrum which varied only—depending on the type of star—from more or less shortwave ultraviolet beyond a maximum in the visible range and reaching far into the infrared.

  Nothing of the sort could be noticed on the stars which worried Khrest so much. Some of them displayed a spectrum which initially seemed to conform to the law of radiation but then suddenly broke the pattern someplace without any apparent reason. Others did not resemble any spectrum ever seen by Khrest or Rhodan. These stars were radiating selectively—like the flame of a candle or the beam of a flashlight.

  One of the stars had a broken spectrum with two maxima—one in the green range and the other in the red. It had the effect of a shining brown point, such as never before observed in the sky of the galaxy.

  Rhodan sighed. "Well, we have no idea where we are and we'll never know unless a miracle, or something like it, happens."

  He watched the impact of his words. He had asked the two Arkonides into the Command Center, as well as Reginald Bell, Majors Nyssen and Deringhouse and, finally, Tako Kakuta as a representative of the Mutants Corps.

  Khrest was deeply discouraged and made no effort to hide his disappointment. Thora, the willowy, white-haired Arkonide woman, was gripped by a similar mood but she knew the attitude of humans toward a person who gave up hope too quickly so she stared firmly back at Rhodan with a resolute expression on her face.

  The others were pictures of pure curiosity.

  "Now what...?" asked Bell. "Are we stuck here waiting for a miracle?"

  Rhodan nodded earnestly.

  "Aren't you going to at least tell what kind of a miracle you expect?" Thora asked, her voice irritated and nervous.

  "I hope to be able to tell you that in a few hours," answered Rhodan.

  "What are you planning to do?"

  "I'm going to look around—in a space pursuit ship."

  "Do you mean to cover a distance of a few light-years to the nearest of these stars in a pursuit ship?" Thora sounded cynical.

  Rhodan shook his head.

  "No. I won't go any farther away from the Stardust than a few astronomical units."

  "What for?"

  "This sector of space," lectured Rhodan, "is the strangest in the universe that Khrest—let alone myself—has ever encountered anywhere. The nearest of this group of fifty-six stars is five light-years away from our present location, the farthest a hundred-eighty light-years. Beyond that boundary there exists at an enormous distance a barely discernible mass of matter, perhaps a galaxy.

  "The star density in this area is much lower than within a galaxy but higher than one would expect outside. The spectrums of the fifty-six stars exasperate the analyst. According to all we know, there cannot be any such spectrums.

  "The suspicion that the structure of the space in which we find ourselves is of a different nature than we are accustomed to is inescapable. However, since we cannot discover anything unusual with our most sensitive instruments, I'll take a look outside the vessel."

  Deringhouse jumped up.

  "Isn't this my responsibility?"

  Rhodan waved him away.

  "No. Forget it!" Rhodan answered in a serious tone. "If my theory is correct, then..."

  He did not finish the sentence.

  Thoughtfully, he slowly walked over to the telecom and gave the order to have one of the small, fast machines readied for him in the northern airlock of the Stardust.

  The pursuit ship darted out of the huge airlock. Although Rhodan was flying with only moderate acceleration, the tremendous sphere of the spaceship was shrinking terribly fast.

  In the course of a few minutes the machine reached a velocity of three hundred miles per second. Rhodan throttled the engine and adjusted the thrust neutralizer so that also during free flight earthly gravity prevailed in his small cockpit. His measuring instruments remained at rest. Only the mass of the Stardust was registered, nothing else.

  After having traveled for fifteen minutes in a straight line from the Stardust without noticing anything unusual, he increased the speed of his pursuit ship.

  He flew around in a wide loop at about twelve hundred miles per second, ending his initial direction of flight and, finally, moved at a right
angle to his prior course.

  After another fifteen minutes had elapsed, he resolutely stepped up his velocity with a short thrust to six thousand miles per second and set his course at 45° to the first as well as the second flight direction.

  The mass of the Stardust still clearly showed on the indicator and the hull of the vessel shone like a bright star at an angle behind him.

  An unreal star, thought Rhodan. The light which the Stardust reflected made him feel uneasy and he wondered why. There was nothing more natural than the sight of a ship transformed into a kind of star by moving far enough away from it.

  Bell's somewhat nervous voice interrupted his thoughts.

  "Why don't you call us? What's going on out there?"

  "Nothing. Absolutely nothing."

  Bell grunted contentedly.

  "What did you expect?"

  "I don't know. Something..."

  "Hello! Do you still hear me? I asked: what did you expect?"

  "And I said: I don't know," answered Rhodan.

  A few seconds later Bell's gruff voice repeated: "I don't hear you anymore, Chief! What's the matter?"

  Puzzled, Rhodan looked at the switchboard. The control mechanism did not register any damage. Everything aboard the pursuit ship was intact, including the telecom transmitter.

  "Rhodan to Stardust!" he shouted. "Do you hear me?"

  The answer was merely a monotonous murmur. The receiver was dead. They had not turned it off at the other end but they no longer heard him.

  Without doubt they could follow his course with the aid of the mass detector. They knew that the spacefighter was still within reach of the Stardust. Rhodan was troubled by the thought of what Reginald Bell might do in his quick-tempered manner, shunning any compromise.

  The Stardust must not be allowed to move.

  Rhodan fired his forward jets. Brightly shining beams of particles shot as fast as light from the flat, wide jet orifices and began to counteract the forward flight of the space-fighter.

  A number of ideas crossed Rhodan's mind.

  He could give the Stardust a signal with the brilliant beam of his impulse-ray weapon to let them know that he was still alive. For the same purpose he could set off a bomb with a short time delay—

  Then it occurred to him that Bell would interpret all such signals as a sign that he had encountered an invisible adversary. For that reason he discarded the ideas.

  The forward jets required a few minutes of maximum output to retard the momentum of the pursuit ship. Still in the braking process, Rhodan pulled his machine around in a tight curve, severely taxing the limits of the neutralizers. Approximately ten minutes after losing contact with the Stardust, the pursuit ship was again able to resume its flight in the direction of the vessel

  The Stardust had not yet moved. Rhodan checked the range finder and determined that he was about one astronomic unit, or ninety million miles, away from the spaceship. If he accelerated with top speed, he could possibly reach them before Bell gave orders to start for the rescue from his presumed dilemma.

  They were bound to see on the observation screen of the mass detector that he was again approaching the vessel and would wait for him if they did not lose their nerve.

  He pushed his machine to the limit. This way he would need no longer than half an hour.

  His course was set for the Stardust and the narrow, bright band of light showed 0°. But it did not hold as steadily on the zero mark as it should have. The lightband quivered, wandered a few thousandths of an inch to the left, returned and drifted off again.

  Rhodan disregarded what he meant to do and shut off the engine. The pursuit ship reacted promptly. Albeit hesitantly, the light-band indicating his course drifted steadily away without returning.

  Rhodan observed the dial with fascination. Minus 1°—minus 2°—his machine obediently followed the influence of a force from an invisible source. Rhodan knew that the instruments recorded all details. Thus he would later be in a position to evaluate the record on board the Stardust. But he was gripped by impatience and he tried to locate the source of energy while the pursuit ship changed its course from mark to mark and from degree to degree.

  However, the regular range finder did not detect anything except the mass of the Stardust, suspended motionless in space off to the side.

  Yet the gravity indicator registered the minute influence of attractive forces and showed the direction in which the acceleration acted. Rhodan probed the space in that direction with all the instruments he had available but found nothing.

  A source of gravity in a void!

  As ridiculous as the spectrums of the stars they had examined.

  For half an hour Rhodan and his machine yielded without resistance to the mysterious influence. During that time he veered 10° from his original course until his ship threatened to bypass the Stardust.

  At the end of that half hour the direction of his flight suddenly stopped changing. The gravity meter failed to show anything and the trajectory described by the pursuit ship was that of a freefalling object in an inertialess system.

  The gravitation had ceased to have any effect. Somebody had turned it off.

  Turned it off?

  While he corrected his course and directed, at last, the nose of his pursuit ship toward the sparkling sphere of the Stardust, Rhodan tried to evaluate the amount of energy required to produce a field of gravity of the magnitude to which his machine had just been exposed. The fact that the change of course was steady and linear with time indicated that the source of the field was very far—at least three astronomical units distant. To create an artificial field of gravity with strong effects at such a distance required more energy than—

  Than what? More than the total energy, for example, at disposal on Earth. This was a field as radiated by a sun. But the gravitational field of a sun does not suddenly change as had occurred here.

  There is no explanation, thought Rhodan with resignation.

  He attempted once more to get in touch with the Stardust. But it was to no avail.

  He remembered that he was thinking about a problem when Bell had called him and tried to recollect what it was. Something had bothered him, but what?

  The light shining from the Stardust, of course!

  Thoughtfully he stared at the glittering point of light made on the observation screen by the spherical hull of the mighty vessel.

  Suddenly the revelation struck him like an electric shock.

  Nowhere in the vicinity was there a source of light which could be reflected by the ship's body. It would have been ridiculous to believe that the light from fifty-six stars, the closest of which was five light-years away and the farthest a hundred-eighty years, could have been sufficient to light up the Stardust for a distance of more than 600,000 miles.

  The vessel itself did not shine.

  Then what? Rhodan asked himself anxiously and impatiently.

  Under these circumstances he should have lost sight of the vessel after traveling more than a few thousand miles away. An object which does not have light to reflect and does not shine itself is invisible.

  Nonetheless the Stardust was clearly visible. More than that: it shone brighter than the nearest star and had done so even when the pursuit ship was at the farthest point of its flight.

  Was there a solution to this puzzle?

  Rhodan did not find the answer before he got busy navigating his machine with its semiautomatic steering into the correct position near the giant sphere of the Stardust. Half unconsciously he searched the curved sides of the vessel for the reflection of the light by which the Stardust was so easily seen, but he found none.

  Suddenly the telecom started to function again. "We're not going to let the machine enter if we don't get any answer!" He heard Bell's excited voice.

  "It's all right!" Rhodan reported with relief. "Here I am!"

  He heard Bell gasp for air.

  "Why didn't you answer all this time?"

  "I couldn't. The
telecom didn't work."

  "And now it's suddenly working again..."

  "Yes. We'll talk about it later."

  Slowly, yard by yard, the space-fighter floated toward the big northern airlock.

  A guide-beam took over on the last stretch of the way and pulled him in without Rhodan having to do anything.

  Rhodan made the prescribed check of all instruments. Then he got out. Meanwhile the lock had been filled with breathable air. He shed his protective suit while he went by walk-belt and antigrav elevator to the Command Center.

  "Three new riddles!" Rhodan said gravely. "The visibility of the vessel, the existence of a gravity source of variable magnitude and the failure of my telecom. Does anybody have an explanation?"

  The question was rhetorical. He could see it on their faces. They expected him to give the explanation.

  But he did not have an explanation anymore than they did.

  "Well," he continued, "we don't know. We're confronted with a mystery, or rather a number of mysteries, which cannot be solved even by Arkonide science. We'll have to wait."

  This suggestion, however, was irreconcilable with Thora's impatience. Her reddish eyes flashed boldly and a little angrily as she said: "Wait? Wait for what? There are fifty-six stars we can investigate. Why don't we begin with them?"

  She's beautiful, thought Rhodan, taking his time to answer her.

  "Because it would take too much time," he said finally, "to search every star and its planets for clues. Moreover, this region of space presents so many problems which we cannot foresee, not to mention solving them."

  Thora did not agree at all. She was about to reply but Khrest broke in.