Calling the Empress

Illustrated by Williams
The chart in the terminal building at Canalopsis Spaceport, Mars, was a huge thing that was the focus of all eyes. It occupied a thirty-by-thirty space in the center of one wall, and it had a far-flung iron railing about it to keep the people from crowding it too close, thus shutting off the view. It was a popular display, for it helped to drive home the fact that space travel was different from anything else. People were aware that their lives had been built upon going from one fixed place to another place, equally immobile. But in Interplanet travel one left a moving planet for another planet, moving at a different velocity. You found that the shortest distance was not a straight line but a space curve involving higher mathematics.
The courses being traveled at the time were marked, and those that would be traversed in the very near future were drawn upon the chart, too, all appropriately labeled. At a glance, one could see that in fifty minutes and seventeen seconds, the Empress of Kolain would take off from Mars, which was the red disk on the right; and she would travel along the curve so marked to Venus, which was almost one hundred and sixty degrees clockwise around the Sun. People were glad of the chance to go on this trip because the famous Relay Station would come within a telescope's sight on the way.
The Empress of Kolain would slide into Venus on the day side and a few hours later she would lift again to head for Terra, a few degrees ahead of Venus and about thirty million miles away.
Precisely on the zero-zero, the Empress of Kolain lifted upward on four tenuous pillars of dull-red glow and drove a hole in the sky. The glow was almost lost in the bright sunshine, and soon it died. The Empress of Kolain was a little world in itself, and would so remain until it dropped onto the ground at Venus, almost two hundred million miles away.
Driving upward, the Empress of Kolain could not have been out of the thin Martian atmosphere when a warning bell rang in the telephone and telespace office at the terminal. The bell caught official ears, and all work was stopped as the personnel of the communications office ran to the machine to see what was so important that the immediate attention signal was rung.