‘Not exactly. It’s more of a pleasure trip.’
‘Now ain’t that nice! Though it beats me what pleasure you expect to find on Mars.’ He glanced out the port where the reddish curve of Mars pushed up into the black.
‘We’ll do some sightseeing I expect’
‘More to see in the State of Vermont than on this whole planet I know.’ He looked around. ‘This your whole family?’
‘All but my wife.’ Roger Stone explained the situation.
‘Oh, yes! Read about it in the daily War Cry. They got the name of your ship wrong, though.’
Hazel snorted in disgust ‘Newspapers!’
‘Yes, mum. I put the War God down just four hours ago. Berths 32 & 33. She’s in quarantine, though.’ He pulled out a pipe ‘You folks got static precipitation?’
Yes,’ agreed Hazel. ‘Go ahead and smoke, young man.’
‘Thanks on both counts.’ He made almost a career of getting it lighted; Pollux began to wonder when he intended to figure his ballistic.
But Jason Thomas did not bother even to glance at the radar screen; instead he started a long and meandering story about his brother-in-law back Earthside. It seemed that this connection of his had tried to train a parrot to act as an alarm clock.
The twins knew nothing of parrots and cared less. Castor began to get worried. Was this moron going to crash the Stone? He began to doubt that Thomas was a pilot of any sort. The story ambled on and on. Thomas interrupted himself to say, ‘Better hang on, everybody. And somebody ought to hold the baby.’
‘I’m not a baby,’ Lowell protested.
‘I wish I was one, youngster.’ His hand sought his control panel as Hazel gathered Lowell in. ‘But the joke of the whole thing was —,’ A deafening rumble shook the ship, a sound somehow more earsplitting than their own jet. It continued for seconds only, as it died Thomas continued triumphantly:
‘— the bird never did learn to tell time. Thanks, folks. The office’ll bill you.’ He stood up with a catlike motion, slid across or without lifting his feet ‘Glad to have met you. G’bye!’
They were down on Phobos.
Pollux got up from where he had sprawled on the deck-plates — and bumped his head on the overhead. After that he tried to walk like Jason Thomas. He had weight, real weight, for the first time since Luna, but it amounted to only two ounces in his clothes. ‘I wonder how high I can jump here?’ he said.
‘Don’t try it,’ Hazel advised. ‘Remember the escape velocity of this piece of real estate is only sixty-six feet a second.’
‘I don’t think a man could jump that fast’
‘There was Ole Gunderson. He dived right around Phobos — a free circular orbit thirty-five miles long. Took him eighty-five minutes. He’d have been traveling yet. If they hadn’t grabbed as he came back around.’
‘Yes, but wasn’t he an Olympic jumper or something? And didn’t he have to have a special rack or some such to take off from?’
‘You wouldn’t have to jump,’ Castor put in. ‘Sixty-six feet a second is forty-five miles an hour, so the circular speed comes out a bit more than thirty miles an hour. A man can run twenty miles an hour back home, easy. He could certainly get up to forty-five here.’
Pollux shook his head. ‘No traction.’
‘Special spiked shoes and maybe a tangent launching ramp for the last hundred yards — then woosh! off the end and you’re gone for good.’
‘Okay, you try it, Grandpa. I’ll wave good-by to you.’
Roger Stone whistled loudly. ‘Quiet, please! If you armchair athletes are quite through, I have an announcement to make.’
‘Do we go groundside now, Dad?’
‘Not if you don’t quit interrupting me. I’m going over to the War God. Anyone who wants to come along, or wishes to take a stroll outside, may do so — just as long as you settle the custody of Buster among you. Wear your boots; I understand they have steel strip walkways for the benefit of transients.’
Pollux was the first one suited up and into the lock, where he was surprised to find the rope ladder still rolled up. He wondered about Jason Thomas and decided that he must have jumped… a hundred-odd feet of drop wouldn’t hurt a man’s arches here. But when he opened the outer door he discovered that it was quite practical to walk straight down the side of the ship like a fly on a wall. He had heard of this but had not quite believed it, not on a planet … well, a moon.