And then, quite without warning, the rocket lurched ahead like an unleashed thunderbolt, its tail jets streaking fire, its nose slashing through the air as it roared up into the clouds.
Chapter 3
Space
It was worse than he ever imagined it could be. Far worse. At first he wanted to scream. He tried to open his mouth, but his jaw muscles didn’t seem to be working. He wondered about this, and he tried to lift his hand to touch his jaw, but something was holding his arm down tight against the foam-rubber cushion.
And then the force of acceleration got to work in earnest.
It pressed down on his body like a giant, mail-covered hand, pushing against his chest with suffocating force. He felt his back sink into the foam rubber, and there was a helpless feeling to the slow, sinking movement that made him want to cry out in panic. The only couch he could see from his position was Jack’s. He saw Jack’s body sinking into the cushion, and then Jack’s mouth popped open in an expression of sheer, raw pain. Sudden fear knifed its way up Ted’s spine as he anticipated the same ripping anguish Jack seemed to be experiencing.
The pain didn’t come. In its place, he felt the tremendous force clawing at the skin on his face, stretching it tight against his skull, pulling his lips back over his teeth, twisting his features into a horrible mask.
He sank deeper and deeper into the foam rubber, the roar of the rockets echoing in his ears. He tried to focus the picture in the radar screen overhead, wondering why it had suddenly become so blurred. Behind the screen, the metal overhead seemed to tilt at a crazy angle, and the cabin seemed to be growing darker. Ted’s mind felt fuzzy, and he wanted to shake his head in an effort to clear the dizziness that was invading his skull. But there were tight metal bands holding his head to the couch, it seemed: formidable bands of steel that forbade movement of any kind.
The blackness struck swiftly, without warning. It seemed to grow in the center of his skull, starting as a small dot and bursting into complete blackness in the space of a heartbeat.
He didn’t fight it.
He allowed it to claim his mind and his body completely as he drifted off into complacent nothingness.
It was quiet.
There was no longer the screaming wail of the jets, no longer the trembling fury of the bulkheads vibrating to the pound of the engines.
He blinked his eyes and stared up at the overhead. Tentatively, like a blind man testing his next step, Ted moved the fingers on his right hand, then the hand itself, then his arm. Across the aisle, Jack was unbuckling his safety belt and sitting up. Ted sat up, too, waved his arm, and weakly said, “Hi.”
Jack grunted, swung his legs over the side of the couch, and pushed against the cushion with his arms.
Slowly, easily, like a balloon drifting over roof tops, he floated across the cabin.
For a moment, Ted forgot all his Academy learning, and his eyes opened wide in honest surprise. He almost said, “Hey, you’re floating!” He realized then that the jets had probably been inactive for a long while now, and as a result, everything in the ship was weightless.
Jack cruised closer, an expression of pain still on his features, as if it had somehow been etched there when the ship started accelerating. Ted unbuckled his belt, anxious to experience the sensation of weightlessness.
“You’d better take it easy at first,” Jack warned. “Most lubbers shove off so hard they crack a few ribs against the bulkheads.”
Ted put his palm against the cushion and gave a small push. He floated off the couch, a delighted smile on his face.
“It feels funny,” he said.
Jack nodded solicitously.
“How do I get down?” Ted wanted to know.
“Down where?” Jack asked. “You’re in space, my friend. No ups or downs here, remember?”
Ted felt a slow flush seep onto his face. Jack seemed to have acquired the knack of making him feel small and foolish, and he wondered whether Jack had changed since he left the Academy, or whether he’d always been that way.
“Everybody up and kicking?” a voice asked.
Ted looked down to see Captain Merola swinging his legs over the side of the couch. The other members of the crew were beginning to stir now, and from Ted’s floating vantage point, he got his first good look at them.
Dr. Gehardt sat up abruptly in the second couch on the port side. He was small and fragile-looking, with a partially bald head saved from complete nakedness by a white fringe circling the back of his skull and continuing up around his ears. Something like the rings around Saturn, Ted thought. The geologist’s nose was short, a stub that perched like a button between intense brown eyes that opened wide now and stared around the cabin.
“The engines?” he asked. “Is there something wrong?”
Merola glanced up, holding tight to the cushion of his couch. “How do you mean, Doc.”
Dr. Gehardt assumed a listening pose, his head cocked to one side. “There is no sound,” he said at last. He shrugged as if to excuse his unfamiliarity with the workings of a rocket ship.
“Nothing to worry about,” Merola assured him. “We’re just in free fall.”
“Fall? Does that mean...?” Dr. Gehardt’s brow wrinkled.
Merola smiled. “I guess it’s not such a good term, Doc, in that it implies a downward motion — which isn’t the case at all. We’re still traveling up from Earth. ‘Free fall’ simply means that our rockets have been turned off.”
“If I may expose my own stupidity...” another voice put in. Ted, floating close to the overhead looked down to see Dr. Phelps, the ship’s physician, swing upright on his couch. The doctor was a thin man with an angular face and a wide, expressive mouth. He looked strangely out of his element in the baggy coveralls worn by the entire crew.
“Glad to have you with us,” Merola said, grinning.
The doctor nodded. “Thank you. May I ask some questions?”
“Sure. Fire away.”
“Well, have we already dropped the first two stages of the rocket?”
Lieutenant Dan Forbes shoved himself off his couch and drifted dangerously close to the radar screen. “Let me answer that one, George,” he said.
Forbes was tall, with a long-limbed body amply padded with muscles that filled out his coveralls. His blond hair was cut close to his scalp, topping the browned, rugged planes of his face like a tight-fitting skullcap. He cocked one blond eyebrow over a gray eye now and said, “Well, Captain, may I?”
“Sure,” Merola said. “Go ahead.”
“We dropped the first two stages quite a while back, Dr. Phelps,” Forbes said. “How high are we now, George?”
Merola glanced over his shoulder at the instrument panel. “Seventy-five miles.”
Forbes nodded. “We dropped the first stage at — check me on these figures, George — a height of 24.9 miles.” He looked at Merola. “That right?”
“Go on,” Merola said.
“When we were 39.8 miles high, we cut off the second stage,” Forbes said. “The third stage, the one we’re in now, kept blasting until we’d reached a height of 63.5 miles.”
“63.3 miles,” Merola corrected.
“63.3 miles,” Forbes amended. “Then we ended our power flight and entered free fall.”
Dr. Gehardt moved to make himself comfortable on the couch, and then opened his mouth in surprise as he began to drift across the cabin. He reached for the cushion and pulled himself back, a pleased smile on his mouth. “This dropping of the stages,” he said, gripping the sides of the couch, “isn’t it dangerous? I mean, when they fall.”