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.