At last the terrain became visible.
It seemed only seconds and they were hovering above the immense interplanetary field where vast spacers awaited launching. Built to accommodate hundreds of thousands, their titanic proportions dwarfed everything around them. Doctor Fortun touched the controls of her helio-plane, and instantly the ship veered and aimed straight for one of the spacers. She flicked a lever and locked the controls. Calmly, she released another lever, and the robot pilot took over. She leaned back with a sigh, her shoulders slumped, silent still.
Mark Lynn's eyes widened. "What are you doing! We'll crash against that Spacer...." He leaped to the controls but the locking mechanism had been set for arrival and could not be unlocked until the ship came to a stop. At the urgency in his voice, Palanth jerked forward wide awake, in time to glimpse the cavernous proportions of the starboard port of the interplanetary spacer yawning open to receive them.
As it entered the stupendous spacer, the helio-plane decelerated suddenly, coming to an abrupt stop that pressed them back against their ultra-padded seats as if a gigantic hand had pushed them back. Instantly the spacer's port closed automatically without a sound and vari-colored lights flashed within the ship. A bell rang shrilly, insistently somewhere.
"Strap yourselves immediately and push that small lever on the side of your seats, it'll convert them into couches," Doctor Fortun directed hurriedly. "Prepare for launching!" She herself was already busy converting her own seat and then strapping herself. From a pocket of her tunic she took a tiny box and opening it took two pellets which she swallowed; within seconds she was unconscious. Mark reached over and took the box from her nerveless fingers. "Vanadol! For those who do not wish the sleep-freeze, Palanth! Do you want any? Or will you withstand the gravs?"
"Neither, I'll submerge my conscious mind and thus preserve everything that occurs in my subconscious without suffering the effects of acceleration."
"So will I," Mark agreed. His dark green eyes were lambent with fury. "We've been tricked very neatly, old Spacer. We're going somewhere, willy-nilly. The first trick's theirs!" He gazed at the unconscious form of the girl with a mixture of sorrow and anger. "The same old story on a higher plane," he whispered to himself. "A memorable night—and the next day shanghaied into space! I wonder if the ancients staffed their crude water vessels in this manner?"
As they submerged their conscious minds, a buzzer vibrated throughout the interplanetary spacer, a tremor went through the beryllium alloy monster and suddenly it catapulted into space on the astro-warp, robot-controlled until beyond the gravitational pull of Terra. The tiny Helio-Plane, tiny in comparison with the titanic spacer, hung suspended in a special craddle to minimize still further the effects of 2g's acceleration. Doctor Fortun and the two Internationals were too valuable to take chances. But the incongruous three were beyond inductive thinking as the "Stellar-Virgin" leaped away from Earth.
They didn't hear a mechanical voice order: "Free fall into orbit three." Presently the ship settled into the warp. After a while, the same mechanical voice ordering: "Free fall into orbit nine." Presently the Space Drive took hold as the interplanetary cruiser warped out into free space. The normal gravity plates began to function and instantly the pressure ceased.