Don looked at her, thinking that she looked more like an oversized and unusually ugly concrete mixer than a space ship. The roots of her amputated wings stubbed out sadly to port and starboard. Her needle nose had been trimmed off and replaced by a bulbous special radar housing. She was scarred here and there by the marks of cutting torches where modifications had been done hastily and with no attempt to pretty up, smooth out, and make ship-shape after the surgery.
Her rocket tubes were gone and the space formerly occupied by rocket fuel tanks now held an atomic power pile, while a major part of what had been her passenger space was now taken up by a massive bulkhead, the antiradiation shield to protect the crew from the deadly emanations of the pile. All over her outer surface, disfiguring what had been sleek streamlines, were bulging discoids-"antennas" Conrad had called them, antennas used to strain the very shape of space. They did not look much like antennas to Don.
The Little David carried a crew of nine, Rhodes, Conrad, Harvey, and six others, all young and all on "makeelearnee"-except Roger Conrad who carried the undignified title of "Gadget Officer," that being shorter than "Officer in Charge of Special Appliances." She carried one passenger, Old Malath. He was not in sight and Don did not look for him; the after part of the remaining cabin space had been sealed off for his use and airconditioned thin, dry, and cold.
All were aboard, the lock was sealed, and Don sat down. Despite the space taken up by the new equipment enough passenger seats had been left in the little ship to accommodate them. Captain Rhodes settled himself in his control seat and barked, "Acceleration stations! Fasten beltsl" Don did so.
Rhodes turned to Conrad who was still standing. Conrad said conversationally, "About two minutes, gentlemen. Since we had no time for a test run, this will be a very interesting experiment. Any of three things can happen.
He paused.
Rhodes snapped, "Yes? Go on!"
"First, nothing might happen. We might bog down on a slight theoretical oversight. Second, it might work. And third-it might blow up." He grinned. "Anyone want to place a small bet?"
Nobody answered. He glanced down and said, "Okay, Captain-twist her tail!"
It seemed to Don that it had suddenly become night and that they had gone immediately into free fall. His stomach, long used to the fairly high gravity of Venus, lurched and complained. Conrad, not strapped down, was floating, anchored by one hand to his control board. "Sorry, gentlemen!" he said. "Slight oversight. Now let's adjust this locus to Mars normal, as an accommodation to our passenger." He fiddled with his dials.
Don's stomach went abruptly back into place as a quite satisfactory weight of more than one-third g took over. Conrad said, "Very well, Captain, you can let them unstrap."
Someone behind Don said, "What's the matter? Didn't it work?"
Conrad said, "Oh, yes, it worked. In fact we have been accelerating at about-" He stopped to study his dials. "-twenty gravities ever since we left the atmosphere."
The ship remained surrounded by darkness, cut off from the rest of the universe by what was inadequately described as a "discontinuity," save for a few minutes every other watch when Conrad cut the field to enable Captain Rhodes to see out and thereby take direct star sights. During these periods they were in free fall and the stars shone sharp through the ports. Then the darkness again would close in and the Little David would revert to a little world of its own.
Captain Rhodes showed a persisting tendency to swear softly to himself after each fix and to work his calculations through at least three times.
In between times Conrad conducted "gadget class" for as many hours each day as he could stand it. Don found most of the explanations as baffling as the one Conrad had given Phipps. "I just don't get it, Rog," he confessed after their instructor had been over the same point three times.
Conrad shrugged and grinned. "Don't let it throw you. By the time you have helped install the equipment in your own ship, you'll know it the way your foot knows your shoe. Meantime, let's run through it again."
Aside from instructions there was nothing to do and the ship was too small and too crowded in any case. A card game ran almost continuously. Don had very little money to start with; very soon he had none and was no longer part of the game. He slept and he thought.
Phipps had been right, he decided; travel at this speed would change things-people would go planet-jumping as casually as they now went from continent to continent on Earth. It would be like-well, like the change from sailing ships to trans-ocean rockets, only the change would be overnight, instead of spread over three centuries.
Maybe he would go back to Earth someday; Earth had its points-horseback riding, for instance. He wondered if Lazy still remembered him?
He'd like to teach Isobel to ride a horse. He'd like to see her face when she first laid eyes on a horse!
One thing he knew: he would not stay on Earth, even if he did go back. Nor would he stay on Venus-nor on Mars. He knew now where he belonged-in space, where he was born. Any planet was merely a hotel to him; space was his home.
Maybe he would go out in the Pathfinder, out to the stars. He had a sneaking hunch that, if they came through this stunt alive, a member of the original crew of the Little David would be able to wangle it to be chosen for the Long Trip. Of course, the Pathfinder was limited to married couples only, but that was not an obstacle. He was certain that he would be married in time to qualify although he could not remember clearly just when he had come by that knowledge. And Isobel was the whither-thou-goest sort; she wouldn't hold him back. The Pathfinder would not leave right away in any case; they would wait to change over to the Horst-Milne-Conrad drive, once they knew about it.
In any event he meant to stir around a bit, do some traveling, once the war was over. They would surely have to transfer him to the High Guard when he got back, then High Guard experience would stand him in good stead when he was a discharged veteran. Come to think about it, maybe he was already in the High Guard, so to speak.
McMasters had certainly been right; there was just one way to get to Mars-in a spacing task force.
He looked around him. The inevitable card game was still in progress and two of his mates were shooting dice on the deckplates, the cubes spinning lazily in the low paragravity field. Conrad had opened up his chair and was stretched out asleep, his mouth open. He decided that it certainly did not look like a world-saving task force; the place had more the air of an unmade bed.
They were due to "come out" on the eleventh day, within easy free fall of Mars, and-if all guesses had been rightclose by the Federation task force, making almost a photo finish with those ships. "Gadget class" gave way to drill at battle stations. Rhodes picked Art Frankel, who had had some shiphandling experience, as his co-pilot; Conrad was assisted by Franklyn Chiang, a physicist like himself. Of the other four, two were on radio, two on radar. ;Don's battle station was a saddle amidships, back of the pilots' chairs-the "dead man's" seat. Here he guarded a springloaded demolition switch, a type of switch known through the centuries as a "dead-man" switch for the contrary reason that it operated only if its operator were dead.
At first drill Conrad got the others squared away, then came back to Don's station. "You savvy what you are to do, Don?"
"Sure. I throw this switch to arm the bomb, then I hang onto the dead-man switch."
"No, no! Grab the dead-man switch first-then close the arming switch"
"Yes, sure. I just said it backwards."