Running down the middle, clearly visible through the walls, was the only metal part of the ship – the shaft, or, more properly, the axis core, and the spreading sheaf of deKalb receptors at its terminus. The appearance was enough like a giant witch’s broom to justify the nickname. Since the saddles, of transparent plastic, were mounted tandem oven the shaft so that the metal rod passed between the legs of the pilot and passengers, the nickname was doubly apt
‘Son,’ Grimes remarked, ‘I know I ain’t pretty, nor am I graceful. Nevertheless, I retain a certain residuum of self- respect and some shreds of dignity. I am not going to tuck that thing between my shanks and go scooting through the air on it
‘Oh, rats! You’re old-fashioned.
‘I may be. Nevertheless, any peculiarities I have managed to retain to my present age I plan to hang on to. No.
‘Look – I’ll polarize the hull before we raise. How about it?
‘Opaque?
‘Opaque.
Grimes slid a regretful glance at his own frumpish boat, but assented by fumbling for the barely visible port of the speedster. Stevens assisted him; they climbed in and straddled the stick
‘Atta boy, Doc,’ Stevens commended, ‘I’ll have you there in three shakes. That tub of yours probably won’t do over five hundred, and Wheelchair must be all of twenty-five thousand miles up.
‘I’m never in a hurry,’ Grimes commented, ‘and don’t call Waldo’s house “Wheelchair” – not to his face.
‘I’ll remember,’ Stevens promised. He fumbled, apparently in empty air; the hull suddenly became dead black, concealing them. It changed as suddenly to mirror bright; the car quivered, then shot up out of sight
Waldo F. Jones seemed to be floating in thin air at the centre of a spherical room. The appearance was caused by the fact that he was indeed floating in air. His house lay in a free orbit, with a period of just over twenty-four hours. No spin had been impressed on his home; the pseudo gravity of centrifugal force was the thing he wanted least. He had left Earth to get away from its gravitational field; he had not been down to the surface once in the seventeen years since his house was built and towed into her orbit; he never intended to do so for any purpose whatsoever
Here, floating free in space in his own air-conditioned shell, he was almost free of the unbearable lifelong slavery to his impotent muscles. What little strength he had he could spend economically, in movement, rather than in fighting against the tearing, tiring weight of the Earth’s thick field
Waldo had been acutely interested in space flight since early boyhood, not from any desire to explore the depths, but because his boyish, overtrained mind had seen the enormous advantage, to him, in weightlessness. While still in his teens he had helped the early experimenters in space flight over a hump by supplying them with a control system which a pilot could handle delicately while under the strain of two or three gravities
Such an invention was no trouble at all to him; he had simply adapted manipulating devices which he himself used in combating the overpowering weight of one gravity. The first successful and safe rocket ship contained relays which had once aided Waldo in moving himself from bed to wheelchair
The deceleration tanks, which are now standard equipment for the lunar mail ships, traced their parentage to a flotation tank in which Waldo habitually had eaten and slept up to the time when he left the home of his parents for his present, somewhat unique home. Most of his basic inventions had originally been conceived for his personal convenience, and only later adapted for commercial exploitation. Even the ubiquitous and grotesquely humanoid gadgets known universally as ‘waldocs’ – Waldo F. Jones’s Synchronous Reduplicating Pantograph, Pat #296,001,437, new series, et al – passed through several generations of development and private use in Waldo’s machine shop before he redesigned them for mass production. The first of them, a primitive gadget compared with the waldoes now to be found in every shop, factory, plant, and warehouse in the country, had been designed to enable Waldo to operate a metal lathe