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This hull was a sphere of reinforced self-sealing plastic, fifty

meters across, its outside smoothness broken by hatches, ports, air locks, and the like. The various decks sliced it in parallel planes. Aft, diametrically opposite this turret, the hull opened on the fire chamber. And thence ran two thin metal skeletons, thirty meters apart, a hundred meters long, like radio masts or ancient oil derricks. They comprised two series of rings, a couple of centimeters in diameter, with auxiliary wiring and a spidery framework holding it all together—the ion accelerators, built into and supported by the gravitic trans­ceiver web.

“A ten-second test blast, if you please, Engineer Sverdlov,” said Nakamura.

The instruments showed him a certain unbalance in the distribution of mass within the hull. Yussuf bin Suleiman, who had just finished watch aboard the ship and gone back to Earth, was sloppy about . . . no, it was unjust to think so

say that he had his own style of piloting. Nakamura set the pumps to work. Mercury ran from the fuel deck to the trim tanks.

By then the ship was pointed correctly and it was time to start decelerating again. “Stand by for blast . . . Report .

I shall want one-point-five-seven standard gees for—” Nakamura reeled it off almost automatically.

It rumbled in the ship. Weight came, like a sudden fist in the belly. Nakamura held his body relaxed in harness, only his eyes moved, now and then a finger touched a control. The secret of judo, of life, was to hold every part of the organism at ease except those precise tissues needed for the moment’s task— Why was it so damnably difficult to put into practice?

M

ERCURY fed through pipes and pumps, past Sverdlov’s control board, past the radiation wall, into the expan­sion chamber and through the ionizer and so as a spray past the sunlike heart of a thermonuclear plasma. Briefly, each atom endured a rage of mesons. It broke down, gave up its mass as pure energy, which at once became proton-antiproton pairs. Magnetic fields separated them as they were born: posi­tive and negative particles fled down the linear accelerators. The plasma, converting the death of matter directly to electric­ity, charged each ring at a successively higher potential. When

the particles emerged from the last ring, they were traveling at three-fourths the speed of light.

At such an exhaust velocity,, no great mass had to be dis­charged. Nor was the twin stream visible; it was too efficient. Sensitive instruments might have detected a pale gamma-colored splotch, very far behind the ship, as a few opposite charges finally converged on each other, but that effect was of no importance.

The process was energy-eating. It had to be. Otherwise sur­plus heat would have vaporized the ship. The plasma fur­nished energy to spare. The process was a good deal more complex than a few words can describe, and yet less so than an engineer accustomed to more primitive branches of his art might imagine.

Nakamura gave himself up to the instruments. Their read­ings checked out with his running computation. The Cross was approaching the black star in a complex spiral curve, the re­sultant of several velocities and two accelerating vectors, which would become a nearly circular orbit seven hundred fifty thousand kilometers out.

He started to awareness of time when Ryerson came up the shaftway rungs. “Oh,” he exclaimed.

“Tea, sir,” said the boy shyly.

“Thank you. Ah . . . set it down there, please . . . the reg­ulations forbid entering this turret during blast without in­quiring of the—No, no. Please!” Nakamura waved a hand, laughing. “You did not know. There is no harm done.”

He saw Ryerson, stooped under one and a half gravities, lift a heavy head to the foreign stars. The Milky Way formed a cold halo about his tangled hair. Nakamura asked gently, “This is your first time in extrasolar space, yes?”

“Y-yes, sir.” Ryerson licked his lips. The blue eyes were somehow hazy, unable to focus closer than the nebulae.

“Do not—” Nakamura paused. He had been about to say, “Do not be afraid,” but it might hurt. He felt after words. “Space is a good place to meditate,” he said. “I use the wrong word, of course. ‘Meditation,’ in Zen, consists more of an at­tempt at identification with the universe than verbalized thinking. What I mean to say,” he floundered, “is this: Some people feel themselves so helplessly small out here that they