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Libby smiled shyly and left. He found the spaces abaft the control room swarming with floating
bodies but he managed to find an unused corner, passed his kilt belt through a handihold, and slept at
once.
Free fall should have been as great a relief to everyone else; it was not, except to the fraction of one
per cent who were salted spacemen. Free-fall nausea, likes seasickness, is a joke only to those not
affected; it would take a Dante to describe a hundred thousand cases of it. There were anti-nausea drugs
aboard, but they were not found at once; there were medical men among the Families, but they were
sick, too. The misery went on.
Barstow, himself long since used to free flight, floated forward to the control room to pray relief for
the less fortunate. "They're in bad shape," he told Lazarus. "Can't you put spin on the ship and give them
some let-up? It would help a lot."
"And it would make maneuvering difficult, too. Sorry. Look, Zack, a lively ship will be more
important to them in a pinch than just keeping their suppers down. Nobody dies from seasickness
anyhow . . . they just wish they could."
The ship plunged on down, still gaining speed as it fell toward the Sun. The few who felt able
continued slowly to assist the enormous majority who were ill.
Libby continued to sleep, the luxurious return-to-the-womb sleep of those who have learned to enjoy
free fall. He had had almost no sleep since the day the Families had been arrested; his overly active mind
had spent all its time worrying the problem of a new space drive.
The big ship precessed around him; he stirred gently and did not awake. It steadied in a new attitude
and the acceleration warning brought him instantly awake. He oriented himself, placed himself flat against
the after bulkhead, and waited; weight hit him almost at once-three gees this time and he knew that
something was badly wrong. He had gone almost a quarter mile aft before he found a hide-away;
nevertheless he struggled to his feet and started the unlikely task of trying to climb that quarter mile-now
straight up-at three times his proper weight, while blaming himself for having let Lazarus talk him into
leaving the control room.
He managed only a portion of the trip . . . but an heroic portion, one about equal to climbing the
stairs of a ten-story building while carrying a man on each shoulder . . . when resumption of free fall
relieved him. He zipped the rest of the way like a salmon returning home and was in the control room
quickly. "What happened?"
Lazarus said regretfully, "Had to vector, Andy." Slayton Ford said nothing but looked worried.
"Yes, I know. But why?' Libby was already strapping himself against the copilot's couch while
studying the astrogational situation.
"Red lights on the screen." Lazarus described the display, giving coordinates and relative vectors.
Libby nodded thoughtfully. "Naval craft. No commercial vessels would be in such trajectories. A
minelaying bracket."
"That's what I figured. I didn't have time to consult you; I had to use enough mile-seconds to be sure
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they wouldn't have boost enough to reposition on us."
"Yes, you had to." Libby looked worried. "I thought we were free of any possible Naval
interference."
"They're not ours," put in Slayton Ford. "They can't be ours no matter what orders have been given
since I-uh, since I left. They must be Venerian craft."
"Yeah," agreed Lazarus, "they must be. Your pal, the new Administrator, hollered to Venus for help
and they gave it to him-just a friendly gesture of interplanetary good will."
Libby was hardly listening. He was examining data and processing it through the calculator inside his
skull. "Lazarus. . . this new orbit isn't too good."
"I know," Lazarus agreed sadly. "I had to duck . . . so I ducked the only direction they left open to
me-closer to the Sun."
"Too close, perhaps."
The Sun is not a large star, nor is it very hot. But it is hot with reference to men, hot enough to strike
them down dead if they are careless about tropic noonday ninety-two million miles away from it, hot
enough that we who are reared under its rays nevertheless dare not look directly at it.
At a distance of two and a half million miles the Sun beats out with a flare fourteen hundred times as
bright as the worst ever endured in Death Valley, the Sahara, or Aden. Such radiance would not be
perceived as heat or light; it would be death more sudden than the full power of a blaster. The Sun is a
hydrogen bomb, a naturally occurring one; the New Frontiers was skirting the limits of its circle of total
destruction.
It was hot inside the ship. The Families were protected against instant radiant death by the armored
walls but the air temperature continued to mount. They were relieved of the misery of free fall but they
were doubly uncomfortable, both from heat and from the fact that the bulkheads slanted crazily; there
was no level place to stand or lie, The ship was both spinning on its axis and accelerating now; it was
never intended to do both at once and the addition of the two accelerations, angular and linear, met
"down" the direction where outer and after bulkheads met. The ship was being spun through necessity to
permit some of the impinging radiant energy to re-radiate on the "cold" side. The forward acceleration
was equally from necessity, a forlorn-hope maneuver to pass the Sun as far out as possible and as fast as
possible, in order to spend least time at perihelion, the point of closest approach.
It was hot in the control room. Even Lazarus had voluntarily shed his kilt and shucked down to
Venus styles. Metal was hot to the touch. On the great stellarium screen an enormous circle of blackness
marked where the Sun's disc should have been; the receptors had cut out automatically at such a
ridicubus demand.
Lazarus repeated Libby's last words. "'Thirty-seven minutes to perihelion.' We can't take it, Andy.
The ship can't take it."
"I know. I never intended us top this close."
"Of course you didn't. Maybe I shouldn't have maneuvered. Maybe we would have missed the mines
anyway. Oh, well-" Lazarus squared his shoulders and filed it with the might-have-beens. "It looks to me,
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son, about time to try out your gadget." He poked a thumb at Libby's uncouth-looking "space drive."
"You say that all you have to do is to hook up that one connection?"
"That is what is intended. Attach that one lead to any portion of the mass to be affected. Of course I
don't really know that it will work," Libby admitted. "There is no way to test it."
"Suppose it doesn't?'
"There are three possibilities." Libby answered methodically. "In the first place, nothing may happen."
"In which case we fry."
"In the second place, we and the ship may cease to exist as mattei as we know it."
"Dead, you mean. But probably a pleasanter way."
"I suppose so. I don't know what death is. In the third place, if my hypotheses are correct, we will
recede from the Sun at a speed just under that of light." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]