Barnard found that space navigation was more complex than he had
thought. He watched in grudging admiration as the girl rejected course
after course. Finally she looked up at him and frowned.
"We have to go sunward--the sun is almost directly between us and
Pluto. We can get there fast, and speed is our best bet to evade the
Space Police. But it'll be dangerous."
"I'll take the chance," said Barnard. "But don't be reckless with your
own life. How many months will it take?"
"About four days."
He stared suspiciously at her. "It took me fourteen days from Earth to
Mars. What's this crate got that the Inner Planets Line hasn't?"
She smiled. "For a great reporter, you don't know much. They could make
the Earth-Mars run in a day--but that's where the danger comes in. If a
rock gets in their path, they have to be traveling slow enough for the
detectors to find it and change the course. That's done automatically,
but we haven't powerful enough detectors yet to handle high speeds."
"Oh, a job for the instrument makers?" Barnard was beginning to realize
his ignorance.
"You could put it that way. The chance of hitting anything big enough
to hurt a space ship is small, of course, but with hundreds of ships in
space, there would be a lot of wrecks if they all went as fast as we're
going to go!"
* * * * *
They plunged almost directly into the sun, nose forward to cut down the
radiant energy. Gail sat in a sea of charts and tables, calling out
instructions to Barnard, who was learning to handle the controls. She
kept the rockets blazing, and before many hours had passed they could
almost see the sun growing in size.
In the growing warmth, the reporter dozed off to a restless,
nightmarish sleep. He awoke with a start to find himself soggy with
perspiration, his bones aching. Gail, hunched over her figures, looked
up and grinned impishly.
"Warm?" she asked. "The cooling units are going full blast. The vision
plates are all shuttered, but if you want to look, I've swung dark
glass into place."
She gestured to one of the darkened vision plates, and her fingers slid
to a button that opened the shutters. Barnard looked and closed his
eyes when he saw the monstrous body that was the sun.
"I've seen enough," he assured her. "Where are we?"
"Inside the orbit of Mercury. We'll be closer before we're farther
away."
Barnard studied her. At the most dangerous part of their journey, where
space was filled with cosmic debris plunging into the sun, she had lost
her hunted look and worked with a graceful nonchalance. She seemed
actually to be enjoying the whole thing.
The murderous forces of radiant energy pounded at and through the
heavily insulated hulls. Barnard mopped his sweat-soaked face and
waited for the metal of the space ship to ignite. He stared at the girl
and wondered how she could be so happy and poised, though she was as
bedraggled as he was. Was her mind gone, too?
He decided so when she told him, much later:
"Congratulations, Mr. Barnard. Right now you and I are closer to the
sun than any other human beings ever have been--"
He studied her face.
She stared through the darkened glass into the inferno. "Except," she
said thoughtfully, "for a few unfortunate expeditions that fell into
it."
* * * * *
Then they were starting to recede. The _Chicago_ was inside the
eccentric orbit of Vulcan, and starting to plunge away from the sun.
The tremendous velocity they had been building up was far more powerful
than the titanic pull of the sun's gravitational field. Gradually, the
temperature went down to a cool 100 degrees, and the two humans, limp
and worn, took turns catnapping.
Barnard lugged can after can of fuel for the tanks. The motors pounded
constantly, building up greater and greater velocity. At timed
intervals, Gail took sights of the visible planets to check their speed.
Their course curved far above the plane of the ecliptic. No passage
through the asteroid belt at this speed!
That was Gail's main worry. "We're veering out of the crowded belt, but
there're stray asteroids far from the ecliptic plane. If we pass that
region, we'll be in fairly empty space, and more or less safe, except
for the Space Police."
Barnard raised his eyebrows. "Space Police? How could they trace us at
this speed?"
"We're as obvious as a green spaced Venusian in New York," she told
him. "It's the speed--we're actually tearing up space. Lansfer's
instruments could pick us out from a hundred million miles. But that's
a lot of room." She glanced slyly at him. "Now you can write science
articles for the Sunday supplements."
"Lay off me," he begged. His questing fingers found a cigarette as the
clock ticked over to the hour. Smokes were rationed in space. He lit up
and drew smoke into his hungry lungs, then passed the cigarette to Gail.
"At least," he said, "I have a job to do on Pluto, which is more than
you can say. What are you going there for?"
She passed the cigarette back.
"It seemed like a good idea at the time," she said.
Barnard stared silently at her. She looked strangely happy, plunging
toward God-knew-what evils on far Pluto! He felt suddenly disgusted
with the whole affair. They were two fools, defying the Space Police
for the right to seek certain death.
"Gail," he said, "don't go through with it. Slow the ship down and get
off at the nearest human settlement--one of the Jovian moons, or Titan.
I can handle this ship now. My syndicate will pay--"
The entire universe exploded then. He pounded brutally into the concave
walls, whirling end over end as the ship spun madly out of control.
His head crashed as the spherical control room escaped its gyroscopes
and he fought desperately against crushing blackness. Gail--was she
mangled, killed? There was a senseless spinning, and then it was
dark ... dark....
* * * * *
He fought his way out of the blackness. Something was searing his
throat ... he coughed in agony and the shock brought him partly to his
senses.
Gail was pouring brandy into him. He saw her by the hard glare of the
battery-run light. She was bruised and her coveralls were torn, but she
was alive.