Triangle of Power. John Russell Fearn

place affected her brain in the most incredible fashion. Each thought she had seemed to echo, setting her head jangling unbearably. She thought of Earth and home, and immediately the conception was slammed back at her with such intensity it swamped every other idea in her mind. Since she could not exist without thinking, it meant that every notion that came into her brain was reflected back to its source until she felt she would go crazy. Dazed, her head ringing, she clawed her way back into the Ultra and slammed the door. The queer mental ‘echo’ effect ceased immediately.

      Here was a mystery of immense proportions, even to so skilled a scientist as was the Amazon. She spent a few mo­ments recovering her balance after she had clambered from the spacesuit; then, since the answer seemed to lie in the planetoid’s peculiar constitution, she set to work on an analysis of the sample she had brought with her. It explained much, if not everything.

      The specimen was tissue and mineral in about equal proportions, just as a human bone is hard on the exterior with marrow and pulp within. Incredible though the Amazon found the fact, there was no doubt that, in a dim kind of way, the planet was a living thing. One titanic nerve-centre, but of such a low order of intelligence it had not the power of thought, only the power of reflecting them if they came from an outside source.

      “Which accounts for my own thoughts being flung back at me,” the Amazon mused. “This tissue-mineral reflects thoughts as a mirror reflects light-waves. It is vastly resilient, which is why when the Ultra struck it at incredible speed it absorbed the impact.”

      Then she remembered something. Once, when she had been with Abna, they had been being flung into space by a force beam generated by Quorne. He had solved the problem by his knowledge of the fourth dimension, in which space itself could be foreshortened to zero. The Amazon, in her recent troubled state of mind, had forgotten that she had learned every secret Abna possessed.

      Setting the computers to work to check her equations, she arrived at the answer by one of the most complicated feats of mathematics she had ever attempted. Four-dimen­sional geometry was something new to her. She no longer wondered why Abna had wanted to keep it a secret: it un­locked the door to a thousand mysteries of space and time.

      Theoretically, she knew now how to bridge the inconceivable gulf of space between herself and the distant solar system using only the minimal amount of ordinary rocket fuel that remained. Once she had done that she could radio to Earth or Mars for more supplies of copper, and so reach home—but first there was the practical problem of converting her existing power-plant into a four-dimensional one. Then she would need just enough power to give a ten-second burst of furious energy. That energy must envelop the Ultra and isolate it for a few brief seconds from the space in which it stood. Immediately before that happened she would fire the ordinary rockets to build up as much speed as she could, headed in the direction of Earth. After that, four-dimensional science should cause space to move around the Ultra instead of the Ultra moving through it. It depended on how accurate were the equations.

      The Amazon went to work methodically, dismantling the power plant. Twice sheer exhaustion made her give up and rest. It could have been hours, days, or weeks that she toiled: she had no idea. She only knew she must not make a single mistake in the complicated conversion she was attempting. And at last she had it done.

      Fixing the mechanical side of the business did not solve the problem of fuel, however—so, as she had done once before in an emergency, she sacrificed everything made of copper to the matrix of the atomic furnace. Terminals, earthing-rods, wires, struts, light-fitt­ings, switches—the whole lot was torn to pieces and finally moulded at high temperature into a moderate-sized cop­per cube. This she firmly fixed in the jaws of the power plant and then gave the intricate conversion, now linked with the control board, a final once-over. Everything was apparently in order.

      She made a careful survey of the unfamiliar heavens and, as near as possible, charted the approximate position of the planetoid she was on, then with the aid of computers worked out the approximate position of the Earth. Using what remained of her ordinary rocket fuel, she aligned the Ultra’s nose in that direction, then expended all the remaining fuel to build up as much speed as possible. This done, she was ready.

      She closed the switch that operated the atomic power plant and waited tensely. The plant hummed immediately, and the Ultra became envel­oped in a lavender light that flashed outward from the centre to swallow it in purple haze. To the Amazon the moments that followed were sheer anguish. She felt as if every nerve were being burned out, as if she and the machine were turning tremendously fast spins yet, paradoxically, without moving.

      Space itself swung and warped before the Amazon’s vision, and it seemed as though the stars were hurtling straight towards her.