"Utöver rymden och tiden" , en novelette av Joel Townsley Rogers ; först publicerad i All-American fiction , februari 1938 , enligt Contento index ; reprinted på Super Science Stories , september 1950 , som är tillgänglig på Internetarkiv ; reprinted igen i En skattkammare av stor science fiction, volym en , redigerad av Anthony Boucher .
We stood there beside it on its launching platform, Hooker Hartley and I, in that stupendous moment before its take-off into the distances of ultimate space, while Nivea prepared to christen it with champagne, and the dazed and uncomprehending workmen, who had trucked it forth and set it there, clustered bewilderedly on the ground a hundred feet below. It was a ship capable of accomplishing the great thing that Hartley had conceived and I had planned, I knew without a doubt. It was the greatest of all my inventions, the most stupendously conceived, the most perfectly wrought in every detail. I put my hand on it and stroked its welded sides as if it had been a living bird. A thing of midnight blue and silver, shaped like a great tear, ready for the stars.
"Will it do it, really?" said Hartley, standing there bareheaded with me, hunched and shivering, with his hands jammed in his topcoat pockets, staring at it with his great luminous eyes. "Beyond the orbit, Helver?"
"Beyond the orbit?" I said. "Beyond the drift! Beyond the galaxy!"
"Beyond the galaxy!" he said. "To the outer-galactic void?"
"Beyond! Beyond the utmost nebula!" I said. "To the ultimate limits of space, Hooker!"
[. . . .]
"I use atomic energy for the take-off, Hooker," I explained to him more patiently. "And plenty of it. An adaptation of the neutron-deutron principle, stepped up to the ratio of omega-pi. We take off with an initial speed of five thousand m.p.m., accelerating with geometric progression. She travels by cosmic energy after the first nine minutes, by which time we should be well beyond Mars, I think.
"The problem of power was not too hard to solve, you see—the problem of shape was somewhat more difficult. It is probably that which stumps you. The hull's apparent contour is obvious, of course, but it is merely for the minimum of friction in the atmosphere. Atmospheric pressure keeps it up. Beyond a hundred miles, in half a second, she collapses into her true shape of a ten-pointed star, the only conceivable one, naturally, for maximum efficiency in interstellar space. The way I worked the mechanical problem of the change of shape was this—"