“Hell,” said Rioz, “we were all nervous. Did you see Jim Davis? He was green. I was a little jumpy myself.”
“That’s not it. It wasn’t just—dying, you know. I was thinking— I know it’s funny, but I can’t help it—I was thinking that Dora warned me I’d get myself killed, she’ll never let me hear the last of it. Isn’t that a crummy sort of attitude at a time like that?”
“Listen,” said Rioz, “you wanted to get married, so you got married. Why come to me with your troubles?”
10
The flotilla, welded into a single unit, was returning over its mighty course from Saturn to Mars. Each day it flashed over a length of space it had taken nine days outward.
Ted Long had put the entire crew on emergency. With twenty-five ships embedded in the planetoid taken out of Saturn’s rings and unable to move or maneuver independently, the co-ordination of their power sources into unified blasts was a ticklish problem. The jarring that took place on the first day of travel nearly shook them out from under their hair.
That, at least, smoothed itself out as the velocity raced upward under the steady thrust from behind. They passed the one-hundred-thousand-mile-an-hour mark late on the second day, and climbed steadily toward the million-mile mark and beyond.
Long’s ship, which formed the needle point of the frozen fleet, was the only one which possessed a five-way view of space. It was an uncomfortable position under the circumstances. Long found himself watching tensely, imagining somehow that the stars would slowly begin to slip backward, to whizz past them, under the influence of the multi-ship’s tremendous rate of travel.
They didn’t, of course. They remained nailed to the black backdrop, their distance scorning with patient immobility any speed mere man could achieve.
The men complained bitterly after the first few days. It was not only that they were deprived of the space-float. They were burdened by much more than the ordinary pseudo-gravity field of the ships, by the effects of the fierce acceleration under which they were living. Long himself was weary to death of the relentless pressure against hydraulic cushions.