Don placed his hands against his friend’s armored sides and shoved himself back to his coach. He paused there and said, “Are you going to be all right?”
The dragon made a sound which Don construed as a hiccup cup, and tapped out, “I feel sure of it. This time I am fortified.”
“I hope so. Say, you don’t want to bung up your voder again. Want me to take care of it?”
“If you will, please.”
Don went back and got it, then fastened it to his bags. He had barely time to fasten his safety belts when the first surge of acceleration hit them. It was not so bad, this time, neither as many gravities as the blast-off from Earth nor of as long duration, for they were not breaking free of Earth’s crushing grip but merely adjusting trajectories—modifying the outer end of the Glory Roads elliptical path to make it agree perfectly with the circular orbit of Circum-Terra, the cross-roads station in space which was their destination.
The captain gave them one long powerful shove, waited, then blasted twice more for short intervals, without, Don noted, finding it necessary to invert and blast back. He nodded approval. Good piloting!—the captain knew his vectors. The bullhorn sang out, “Contact! Unstrap at will. Prepare to disembark.”
Don returned the voder to Sir Isaac, then lost track of him, for the dragon again had to be taken aft to be transferred through the cargo hatch. Don whistled goodbye and went forward, towing his bags behind him, to go out through the passenger tube.
Circum-Terra was a great, confused mass in the sky. It had been built, rebuilt, added to, and modified over the course of years for a dozen different purposes-weather observation station, astronomical observatory, meteor count station, television relay, guided missile control station, high vacuum, strain-free physics laboratory, strain-free germ-free biological experiment station, and many other uses.
But most importantly it was a freight and passenger transfer station in space, the place where short-range winged rockets from Earth met the space liners that plied between the planets. For this purpose it had fueling tanks, machine shops, repair cages that could receive the largest liners and the smallest rockets and a spinning, pressurized drum—”Goddard Hotel”—which provided artificial gravity and Earth atmosphere for passengers and for the permanent staff of Circum-Terra.
Goddard Hotel stuck out from the side of Circum-Terra like a cartwheel from a pile of junk. The hub on which it turned ran through its center and protruded out into space. It was to this hub that a ship would couple its passenger tube when discharging or loading humans. That done, the ship would then be warped over to a cargo port in the non-spinning major body of the station. When the Glory Road made contact, there were three other ships in at Circum-Terra: the Valkyrie in which Don Harvey had passage for Mars, the Nautilus, just in from Venus and in which Sir Isaac expected to return home, and the Spring Tide, the Luna shuttle which alternated with its sister the Neap Tide.
The two liners and the moon ship were already tied up to the main body of the station; the Glory Road warped in at the hub of the hotel and immediately began to discharge passengers. Don waited his turn and then pulled himself along by handholds, dragging his bags behind him, and soon found himself inside the hotel, but still in weightless free fall in the cylindrical hub of the Goddard.
A man in overalls directed Don and the dozen passengers he was with to a point halfway along the hub where a large lift blocked further progress. Its circular door stood open and turned very slowly around, moving with the spinning hotel proper. “Get in,” he ordered “Mind you get your feet pointed toward the floor.”
Don got in with the others and found that the inside of the car was cubical. One wall was marked in big letters: FLOOR. Don found a handhold and steadied himself so that his feet would be on the floor when weight was applied. The man got in and started the car out toward the rim.
There was no feeling of weight at first, at least not toward the “floor.” Don experienced a dizzy sensation as increasing spin sloshed the liquid about in his inner ear. He knew that he had ridden this elevator before, when he was eleven and heading for Earth and school, but he had forgotten its unpleasant aspects.