Ross found that there was indeed a whole family on his chest. Breathing was hard work and his eyes seemed foggy.
If Joe had had feelings he need have felt no pride in what he had just done, for his decisions had all been made for him before the ship left the ground. Morrie had selected, with Cargraves’ approval, one of several three-dimensional cams and had installed it in Joe’s innards. The cam “told” Joe what sort of a course to follow to the moon, what course to head first, how fast to gun the rocket and how long to keep it up. Joe could not see the moon- Joe had never heard of the moon -but his electronic senses could perceive how the ship was headed in relation to the steady, unswerving spin of the gyros and then head the ship in the direction called for by the cam in his tummy.
The cam itself had been designed by a remote cousin of Joe’s, the great “Eniac” computer at the University of Pennsylvania. By means of the small astrogation computer in the ship either Morrie or Cargraves could work out any necessary problem and control the Galileo by hand, but Joe, with the aid of his cousin, could do the same thing better, faster, more accurately and with unsleeping care — provided the human pilot knew what to ask of him and how to ask it.
Joe had not been invented by Cargraves; thousands of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians had contributed to his existence. His grandfathers had guided the Nazi V-2 rockets in the horror-haunted last days of World War II. His fathers had been developed for the deadly, ocean-spanning guided missiles of the UN world police force. His brothers and sisters were found in every rocket ship, private and commercial, passenger-carrying or unmanned, that cleft the skies of earth.
Trans-Atlantic hop or trip to the moon, it was all one to Joe. He did what his cam told him to do. He did not care, he did not even know.
Cargraves called out, “How you making out down there?”
“All right, I guess,” Ross answered, his voice laboring painfully.
“I feel sick,” Art admitted with a groan.
“Breathe through your mouth. Take deep breaths.”
“I can’t.”
“Well, hang on. It won’t be long.”
In fact it was only fifty-five seconds at full drive until Joe, still advised by his cam, decided that they had had enough of full drive. The cadmium plates slid farther back into the power pile, thwarting the neutrons; the roar of the rocket drive lessened.
The ship did not slow down; it simply ceased to accelerate so rapidly. It maintained all the speed it had gained and the frictionless vacuum of space did nothing to slow its headlong plunge. But the acceleration was reduced to one earth-surface gravity, one g, enough to overcome the powerful tug of the earth’s mighty weight and thereby permit the ship to speed ahead unchecked — a little less than one g, in fact, as the grasp of the earth was already loosening and would continue to drop off to the change-over, more than 200,000 miles out in space, where the attraction of the moon and that of the earth are equal.
For the four in the ship the reduction in the force of the jet had returned them to a trifle less than normal weight, under an artificial gravity produced by the drive of the jet.
This false “gravity” had nothing to do with the pull of the earth; the attraction of the earth can be felt only when one is anchored to it and supported by it, its oceans, or it’s air.
The attraction of the earth exists out in space but the human body has no senses which can perceive it. If a man were to fall from a tremendous height, say fifty thousand miles, it would not seem to him that he was falling but rather that the earth was rushing up to meet him.
After the tremendous initial drive had eased off, Cargraves called out again to Art. “Feeling any better, kid?”
“I’m all right now,” Art replied.
“Fine. Want to come up here where you can see better?”