Not that he could do anything for them, except crawl wearily from one compartment to another and ask about their welfare. Nothing could be done, no organization to relieve their misery was possible, while high boost continued. They lay where they could, men, women, and children crowded together like cattle being shipped, without even room to stretch out, in spaces never intended for such extreme overcrowding.
The only good thing about it, Barstow reflected wearily, was that they were all too miserable to worry about anything but the dragging minutes. They were too beaten down to make trouble. Later on there would be doubts raised, he was sure, about the wisdom of fleeing; there would be embarrassing questions asked about Ford's presence in the ship, about Lazarus' peculiar and sometimes shady actions, about his own contradictory role. But not yet.
He really must, he decided reluctantly, organize a propaganda campaign before trouble could grow. If it did-and it surely would if he didn't move to offset it, and... well, that would be the last straw. It would be.
He eyed a ladder in front of him, set his teeth, and struggled up to the next deck. Picking his way through the bodies there he almost stepped on a woman who was clutching a baby too tightly to her. Barstow noticed that the infant was wet and soiled and he thought of ordering its mother to take care of the matter, since she seemed to be awake. But he let it go-so far as he knew there was not a clean diaper in millions of miles. Or there might be ten thousand of them on the deck above... which seemed almost as far away.
He plodded on without speaking to her. Eleanor Johnson had not been aware of his concern. After the first great relief at realizing that she and her baby were safe inside the ship she had consigned all her worries to her elders and now felt nothing but the apathy of emotional reaction and of inescapable weight. Baby had cried when that awful weight had hit them, then had become quiet, too quiet. She had roused herself enough to listen for its heartbeat; then, sure that he was alive, she had sunk back into stupor.
Fifteen hours out, with the orbit of Venus only four hours away, Libby cut the boost. The ship plunged on, in free fall, her terrific speed still mounting under the steadily increasing pull of the Sun. Lazarus was awakened by no weight. He glanced at the copilot's couch and said, "On the curve?"
"As plotted."
Lazarus looked him over. "Okay, I've got it. Now get out of here and get some sleep. Boy, you look like a used towel."
"I'll just stay here and rest."
"You will like hell. You haven't slept even when I had the com; if you stay here, you'll be watching instruments and figuring. So beat it! Slayton, chuck him out."
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 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.