“You know I have. Why do you ask?”
“Sure, I know you have, but you still talk like a Grounder. Have you thought of the distances involved? The average asteroid is a hundred twenty million miles from Mars at the closest. That’s twice the Venus-Mars hop and you know that hardly any liners do even that in one jump. They usually stop off at Earth or the Moon. After all, how long do you expect anyone to stay in space, man?”
“I don’t know. What’s your limit?”
“You know the limit. You don’t have to ask me. It’s six months. That’s handbook data. After six months, if you’re still in space, you’re psychotherapy meat. Right, Dick?”
Swenson nodded.
“And that’s just the asteroids,” Rioz went on. “From Mars to Jupiter is three hundred and thirty million miles, and to Saturn it’s seven hundred million. How can anyone handle that kind of distance? Suppose you hit standard velocity or, to make it even, say you get up to a good two hundred kilomiles an hour. It would take you—let’s see, allowing time for acceleration and deceleration—about six or seven months to get to Jupiter and nearly a year to get to Saturn. Of course, you could hike the speed to a million miles an hour, theoretically, but where would you get the water to do that?”
“Gee,” said a small voice attached to a smutty nose and round eyes. “Saturn!”
Dora whirled in her chair. “Peter, march right back into your room!”
“Aw, Ma.”
“Don’t ‘Aw, Ma’ me.” She began to get out of the chair, and Peter scuttled away.