"How's Bobo?" Hugh inquired, as he settled Joe-Jim's armor in place.
"Made the Trip," Joe informed him.
"So? Well, that's that; let's go."
They stopped short of the level of no-weight and worked forward, because the women were not adept at weightless flying. When they reached the bulkhead which separated the Control Room and boat pockets from the body of the Ship, they went up. There was neither alarm nor ambush, although Joe thought that he saw a head show as they reached one deck. He mentioned it to his brother but not to the others.
The door to the boat pocket stuck and Bobo was not there to free it. The men tried it in succession, sweating big with the strain. Joe-Jim tried it a second time, Joe relaxing and letting Jim control their muscles, that they might not fight each other. The door gave. "Get them inside!" snapped Jim.
"And fast!" Joe confirmed. "They're on us." He had kept lookout while his brother strove. A shout from down the line reinforced his warning.
The twins faced around to meet the threat while the men shoved the women in. Alan's fuzzy-headed mate chose that moment to go to pieces, squalled, and tried to run but weightlessness defeated her. Hugh nabbed her, shoved her inside and booted her heartily with his foot.
Joe-Jim let a blade go at long throwing range to slow down the advance. It accomplished its purpose; their opponents, half a dozen of them, checked their advance. Then, apparently on signal, six knives cut the air simultaneonsly.
Jim felt something strike him, felt no pain, and concluded that the armor had saved him. "Missed us, Joe," he exulted.
There was no answer. Jim turned his bead, tried to look at his brother. A few inches from his eye a knife stuck through the bars of the helmet, its point was buried deep inside his left eye.
His brother was dead.
Hugh stuck his head back out of the door. "Come on, Joe-Jim," he shouted. "We're all in."
"Get inside," ordered Jim. "Close the door."
"But--"
"Get inside!" Jim turned, and shoved him in the face, closing the door as he did so. Hugh had one startled glimpse of the knife and the sagging, lifeless face it pinned. Then the door closed against him, and he heard the lever turn.
Jim turned back at the attackers. Shoving himself away from the bulkhead with legs which were curiously heavy, he plunged toward them, his great arm-long knife, more a bob than a sword, grasped with both hands. Knives sang toward him, clattered against his breastplate, bit into his legs. He swung a wide awkward two-handed stroke which gutted an opponent, nearly cutting him in two. "That's for Joe!"
The blow stopped him. He turned in the air, steadied himself, and swung again. "That's for Bobo!"
They closed on him; he swung widely caring not where he hit as long as his blade met resistance. "And that's for me!" A knife planted itself in his thigh. It did not even slow him up; legs were dispensable in no-weight. "'One for all!'"
A man was on his back now he could feel him. No matter; here was one before him, too, one who could feel steel. As be swung, he shouted, "All for o--" The words trailed off, but the stroke was finished.
Hugh tried to open the door which had been slammed in his face. He was unable to do so; if there were means provided to do so, he was unable to figure them out. He pressed an ear against the steel and listened, but the airtight door gave back no clue.
Ertz touched him on the shoulder. "Come on," be said. "Where's Joe-Jim?"
"He stayed behind."
"Open up the door! Get him."
"I can't, it won't open. He meant to stay, he closed it himself."
"But we've got to get him; we're blood-sworn."
"I think," said Hugh, with a sudden flash of insight, "that's why he stayed behind." He told Ertz what he had seen.
"Anyhow," he concluded, "it's the End of the Trip to him. Get on back and feed mass to that Converter. I want power." They entered the Ship's boat proper. Hugh closed the air-lock doors behind them. "Alan!" he called out. "We're going to start. Keep those damned women out of the way."
He settled himself in the pilot's chair, and cut the lights.
In the darkness he covered a pattern of green lights. A transparency flashed on the lap desk: DRIVE READY. Ertz was on the job. Here goes! he thought, and actuated the launching combination. There was a short pause, a short and sickening lurch, a twist. It frightened him, since he had no way of knowing that the launching tracks were pitched to offset the normal spinning of the Ship.
The glass of the view port before him was speckled with stars; they were free -- moving!
But the spread of jeweled lights was not unbroken, as it invariably had been when seen from the veranda, or seen mirrored on the Control Room walls; a great, gross, ungainly shape gleamed softly under the light of the star whose system they had entered. At first he could not account for it. Then with a rush of superstitious awe he realized that he was looking at the Ship itself, the true Ship, seen from the Outside. In spite of his long intellectual awareness of the true nature of the Ship; he had never visualized looking at it. The stars, yes; the surface of a planet, he had struggled with that concept; but the outer surface of the Ship, no.
When he did see it, it shocked him.
Alan touched him. "Hugh, what is it?"
Hoyland tried to explain to him. Alan shook his head, and blinked his eyes. "I don't get it."
"Never mind. Bring Ertz up here. Fetch the women, too; we'll let them see it."
"All right. But," he added, with sound intuition, "it's a mistake to show the women. You'll scare 'em silly; they ain't even seen the stars."
Luck, sound engineering design, and a little knowledge. Good design, ten times that much luck, and a precious little knowledge. It was luck that had placed the Ship near a star with a planetary system, luck that the Ship arrived there with a speed low enough for Hugh to counteract it in a ship's auxiliary craft, luck that he learned to handle it after a fashion before they starved or lost themselves in deep space.
It was good design that provided the little craft with a great reserve of power and speed. The designers had anticipated that the pioneers might need to explore the far-flung planets of a solar system; they had provided for it in the planning of the Ship's boats, with a large factor of safety. Hugh strained that factor to the limit.
It was luck that placed them near the plane of planetary motion, luck that, when Hugh did manage to gun the tiny projectile into a closed orbit, the orbit agreed in direction with the rotation of the planets.
Luck that the eccentric ellipse he achieved should cause them to crawl up on a giant planet so that he was eventually able to identify it as such by sight.
For otherwise they might have spun around that star until they all died of old age, ignoring for the moment the readier hazards of hunger and thirst, without ever coming close enough to a planet to pick it out from the stars.
There is a misconception, geocentric and anthropomorphic, common to the large majority of the earth-bound, which causes them to visualize a planetary system stereoscopically. The mind's eye sees a sun, remote from a backdrop of stars, and surrounded by spinning apples: the planets. Step out on your balcony and look. Can you tell the planets from the stars? Venus you may pick out with ease, but could you tell it from Canopus, if you had not previously been introduced? That little red speck: is it Mars, or is it Antares? How would you know, if you were as ignorant as Hugh Hoyland? Blast for Antares, believing it to be a planet, and you will never live to have grandchildren.
The great planet that they crawled up on, till it showed a visible naked-eye disc, was larger than Jupiter, a companion to the star, somewhat younger and larger the the Sun, around which it swung at a lordly distance. Hugh blasted back, killing his speed over many sleeps, to bring the Ship into a path around the planet. The maneuver brought him close enough to see its moons.