It seemed to Don that it had suddenly become night and that they had gone immediately into free fall. His stomach, long used to the fairly high gravity of Venus, lurched and complained. Conrad, not strapped down, was floating, anchored by one hand to his control board. “Sorry, gentlemen!” he said. “Slight oversight. Now let’s adjust this locus to Mars normal, as an accommodation to our passenger.” He fiddled with his dials.
Don’s stomach went abruptly back into place as a quite satisfactory weight of more than one-third g took over. Conrad said, “Very well, Captain, you can let them unstrap.”
Someone behind Don said, “What’s the matter? Didn’t it work?”
Conrad said, “Oh, yes, it worked. In fact we have been accelerating at about—” He stopped to study his dials. “—twenty gravities ever since we left the atmosphere.”
The ship remained surrounded by darkness, cut off from the rest of the universe by what was inadequately described as a “discontinuity,” save for a few minutes every other watch when Conrad cut the field to enable Captain Rhodes to see out and thereby take direct star sights. During these periods they were in free fall and the stars shone sharp through the ports. Then the darkness again would close in and the Little David would revert to a little world of its own.
Captain Rhodes showed a persisting tendency to swear softly to himself after each fix and to work his calculations through at least three times.
In between times Conrad conducted “gadget class” for as many hours each day as he could stand it. Don found most of the explanations as baffling as the one Conrad had given Phipps. “I just don’t get it, Rog,” he confessed after their instructor had been over the same point three times.
Conrad shrugged and grinned. “Don’t let it throw you. By the time you have helped install the equipment in your own ship, you’ll know it the way your foot knows your shoe. Meantime, let’s run through it again.”
Aside from instructions there was nothing to do and the ship was too small and too crowded in any case. A card game ran almost continuously. Don had very little money to start with; very soon he had none and was no longer part of the game. He slept and he thought.
Phipps had been right, he decided; travel at this speed would change things—people would go planet-jumping as casually as they now went from continent to continent on Earth. It would be like—well, like the change from sailing ships to trans-ocean rockets, only the change would be overnight, instead of spread over three centuries.
Maybe he would go back to Earth someday; Earth had its points—horseback riding, for instance. He wondered if Lazy still remembered him?
He’d like to teach Isobel to ride a horse. He’d like to see her face when she first laid eyes on a horse!
One thing he knew: he would not stay on Earth, even if he did go back. Nor would he stay on Venus—nor on Mars. He knew now where he belonged—in space, where he was born. Any planet was merely a hotel to him; space was his home.
Maybe he would go out in the Pathfinder, out to the stars. He had a sneaking hunch that, if they came through this stunt alive, a member of the original crew of the Little David would be able to wangle it to be chosen for the Long Trip. Of course, the Pathfinder was limited to married couples only, but that was not an obstacle. He was certain that he would be married in time to qualify although he could not remember clearly just when he had come by that knowledge. And Isobel was the whither-thou-goest sort; she wouldn’t hold him back. The Pathfinder would not leave right away in any case; they would wait to change over to the Horst-Milne-Conrad drive, once they knew about it.
In any event he meant to stir around a bit, do some traveling, once the war was over. They would surely have to transfer him to the High Guard when he got back, then High Guard experience would stand him in good stead when he was a discharged veteran. Come to think about it, maybe he was already in the High Guard, so to speak.