The rocket ship was apparently small. At least the control room was quite cramped; I never got a look at the outside. The only other spaceships I had ever been in were the Moon shuttles Evangeline and her sister ship the Gabriel, that being the year in which I had incautiously accepted a lunar engagement on a co-op basis-our impresario had had a notion that a juggling, tightrope, and acrobatic routine would go well in the one-sixth gee of the Moon, which was correct as far as it went, but he had not allowed rehearsal time for us to get used to low gravity. I had to take advantage of the Distressed Travelers Act to get back and I had lost my wardrobe.
There were two men in the control room; one was lying in one of three acceleration couches fiddling with dials, the other was making obscure motions with a screw driver. The one in the couch glanced at me, said nothing. The other one turned, looked worried, then said past me, “What happened to Jock?”
Dak almost levitated out of the hatch behind me. “No time!” he snapped. “Have you compensated for his mass?”
“Red, is she taped? Tower?”
The man in the couch answered lazily, “I’ve been recomputing every two minutes. You’re clear with the tower. Minus forty-, uh, seven seconds.”
“Out of that bunk! Scram! I’m going to catch that tick!”
Red moved lazily out of the couch as Dak got in. The other man shoved me into the copilot’s couch and strapped a safety belt across my chest. He turned and dropped down the escape tube. Red followed him, then stopped with his head and shoulders out. “Tickets, please!” he said cheerfully.
“Oh, cripes!” Dak loosened a safety belt, reached for a pocket, got out the two field passes we bad used to sneak aboard, and shoved them at him.
“Thanks,” Red answered. “See you in church. Hot jets, and so forth.” He disappeared with leisurely swiftness; I heard the air lock close and my eardrums popped. Dak did not answer his farewell; his eyes were busy on the computer dials and he made some minor adjustment.
“Twenty-one seconds,” he said to me. “There’ll be no rundown. Be sure your arms are inside and that you are relaxed. The first step is going to be a honey.”
I did as I was told, then waited for hours in that curtain-going-up tension. Finally I said, “Dak?”
“Shut up!”
“Just one thing: where are we going?”
“Mars.” I saw his thumb jab at a red button and I blacked out.
Chapter 2
What is so funny about a man being dropsick? Those dolts with cast-iron stomachs always laugh-I’ll bet they would laugh if Grandma broke both legs.
I was spacesick, of course, as soon as the rocket ship quit blasting and went into free fall. I came out of it fairly quickly as my stomach was practically empty-I’d eaten nothing since breakfast- and was simply wanly miserable the remaining eternity of that awful trip. It took us an hour and forty-three minutes to make rendezvous, which is roughly equal to a thousand years in purgatory to a ground hog like myself.
I’ll say this for Dak, though: he did not laugh. Dak was a professional and he treated my normal reaction with the impersonal good manners of a ifight nurse-not like those flat-headed, loudvoiced jackasses you’ll find on the passenger list of a Moon shuttle. If I had my way, those healthy self -panickers would be spaced in mid-orbit and allowed to laugh themselves to death in vacuum.
Despite the turmoil in my mind and the thousand questions I wanted to ask we had almost made rendezvous with a torchship, which was in parking orbit around Earth, before I could stir up interest in anything. I suspect that if one were to inform a victim of spacesickness that he was to be shot at sunrise his own answer would be, “Yes? Would you hand me that sack, please?”
But I finally recovered to the point where instead of wanting very badly to die the scale had tipped so that I had a flickering, halfhearted interest in continuing to live. Dak was busy most of the time at the ship’s communicator, apparently talking on a very tight beam for his hands constantly nursed the directional control like a gunner laying a gun under difficulties. I could not hear what he said, or even read his lips, as he had his face pushed into the nimble box. I assumed that he was talking to the long-jump ship we were to meet.