Through the racket I heard Dak ask urgently, “Is the projector all set? The tapes ready?”
“Sure, sure!”
“Got the hypo?” Dak squirmed around in the air and said to me, “Look, shipmate, we’re going to give you a shot. It’s all right. Part of it is Nullgrav, the rest is a stimulant-for you are going to have to stay awake and study your lines. It will make your eyeballs feel hot at first and it may make you itch, but it won’t hurt you.”
“Wait, Dak, I-”
“No time! I’ve got to smoke this scrap heap!” He twisted and was out the door before I could protest. The second man pushed up my left sleeve, held an injection gun against the skin, and I had received the dose before I knew it. Then he was gone. The hooting gave way to: “Red waning! Two gravities! Two minutes!”
I tried to look around but the drug made me even more confused. My eyeballs did feel hot and my teeth as well and I began to feel an almost intolerable itching along my spine-but the safety straps kept me from reaching the tortured area-and perhaps kept me from breaking an arm at acceleration. The hooting stopped again and this time Dak’s self-confident baritone boomed out, “Last red warning! Two gravities! One minute! Knock off those pinochle games and spread your fat carcasses-we’re goin’ to smoke!” The hooting was replaced this time by a recording of Arkezian’s Ad Astra, opus 61 in C major. It was the controversial London Symphony version with the 14-cycle “scare” notes buried in the timpani. Battered, bewildered, and doped as I was, they seemed to have no effect on me-you can’t wet a river.
A mermaid came in the door. No scaly tail, surely, but a mermaid is what she looked like. When my eyes refocused I saw that it was a very likely looking and adequately mammalian young woman in singlet and shorts, swimming along head first in a way that made clear that free fall was no novelty to her. She glanced at me without smiling, placed herself against the other cider press, and took hold of the hand grips-she did not bother with safety belts. The music hit the rolling finale and I felt myself grow very heavy.
Two gravities is not bad, not when you are floating in a liquid bed. The skin over the top of the cider press pushed up around me, supporting me inch by inch; I simply felt heavy and found it hard to breathe. You hear these stories about pilots torching at ten gravities and ruining themselves and I have no doubt that they are true-but two gravities, taken in the cider press, simply makes one feel languid, unable to move.
It was some time before I realized that the horn in the ceiling was speaking to me. “Lorenzo! How are you doing, shipmate?”
“All right.” The effort made me gasp. “How long do we have to put up with this?”
“About two days.”
I must have moaned, for Dak laughed at me. “Quit bellyaching, chum! My first trip to Mars took thirty-seven weeks, every minute of it free fall in an elliptical orbit. You’re taking the luxury route, at a mere double gee for a couple of days-with a one-gee rest at turnover, I might add. We ought to charge you for it.”
I started to tell him what I thought of his humor in scathing green-room idiom, then recalled that there was a lady present. My father had taught me that a woman will forgive any action, up to and including assault with violence, but is easily insulted by language; the lovelier half of our race is symbol-oriented-very strange, in view of their extreme practicality. In any case, I have never let a taboo word pass my lips when it might offend the ears of a lady since the time 1 last received the back of my father’s hard hand full on my mouth. . . Father could have given Professor Pavlov pointers in reflex conditioning.
But Dak was speaking again. “Penny! You there, honey chile?”
“Yes, Captain,” the young woman with me answered.
“Okay, start him on his homework. I’ll be down when I have this firetrap settled in its groove.”