The Flight of the Phoenix
The Never Ending Quest - Episode 33572
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I set the ship - which was called the Phoenix - to accelerate to just
below lightspeed, then cruised for a while as I checked that there were no
problems. If all the green lights on the instrument panel were to be
believed, everything was fine.
This ship was too small to carry the supplies - or enough air - for a long flight, which meant that I needed to cover 30 light years in a matter of a few hours. In round terms, that meant that I needed to travel at a little matter of about 100,000 times the speed of light. I set the autopilot to head in the desired direction at that speed for three hours. Then I leant back in my chair and, taking a deep breath, pressed to "Go" button. As I had known would happen, as we passed through the speed of light - reassuringly smoothly - the stars (whose light had already been showing extreme Doppler shifts) seemed to vanish and the ship appeared to be surrounded by total blackness. I watched the speed display shoot up on its logarthimic scale: 1 - 10 - 100 - 1,000 - 10,000 - and finally level off at 100,000.
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JH
10/19/2003 8:47:14 AM
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