_Shahrazad_ drove steadily forward into deep space, vibrating slightly
to the tremendous thrust of her powerful engines. The small, cramped
cabin was stiflingly hot to the three armored men who sat before its
banked dials, watching their steady needles.
Ryd had blacked out, darkness washing into his eyes and consciousness
draining from his head, as the space ship had pitched out into
emptiness over the end of the runway on Pi Mesa and Mury had cut in the
maindrive. Pressure greater than anything he had ever felt had crushed
him; his voice had been snatched from his lips by those terrible forces
and lost beneath the opening thunder of the three-inch tubes. Up and
up, while the acceleration climbed to seven gravities--and Ryd had lost
every sensation, not to regain them until Earth was dropping away under
the towship's keel.
A single gravity held them back and down in the tilted seats, and the
control panels seemed to curve half above them, their banks of lights
confused with the stars coldly through the great nose window. In the
control room all sounds impinged on a background made up of the insect
hum of air-purifiers, the almost supersonic whine of the fast-spinning
gyroscopes somewhere behind them, the deep continuous growl of the
engines.
Mury's voice broke through that steady murmur, coming from Ryd's right.
"You can unfasten your anticlamps, Ryd," he said dryly. "That doesn't
mean you," to the young navigator, on his other hand as he sat in
the pilot's seat with his pressure-clamps thrown back and his gloved
hands free to caress the multiplex controls before him. Clipped to the
sloping dash at his left elbow was a loaded flame gun.
Ryd emerged, with much bungling, from his padded clamps, and shook his
head groggily as he ran a hand through his slightly thinning hair. He
ventured shakily, "Where are we?"
Mury smiled slightly. "Only our astrogator," he indicated Arliess,
still masked and fettered, "can tell you that with precision. I
understand only enough of astrogational practice to make sure that he
is holding to the course outlined on the log. For that matter ... he
is an intelligent young man and if he were not blinded by notions of
duty to an outworn system.... We are now somewhere near the orbit of
the Moon. Isn't that right, Arliess?"
The other did not seem to hear; he sat staring blindly before him
through his goggles at the slowly-changing chart, where cryptic lights
burned, some moving like glowing paramecia along fine-traced luminous
tracks.
Mury too sat silent and immobile for a minute or more. Then, abruptly,
he inclined his universal chair far to the right, and his long frame
seemed to tense oddly. His finger stabbed out one of the sparks of
light.
"What's that, Arliess?"