Well, that was the way Trase made it. His clothes reeking with his sickness, his body wasted away from inaction, his eyes dimmed and glazed over from suffering, his face a mask of thin ferocity from his determination. But he made it.
There's Saturn, Trase.
He looked out over the burning brilliant flatness of the crape ring to the huge yellow hulk of the God of Time towering over him. The light and majesty of what he saw swam to his brain out of the fogs of bitterness that had shrouded his soul and he saw it—one magnificent reason why men go to space.
Personal Saturn, unreachable Saturn ... yellow, streaked with purple streamers, fading away at the edges into the blackness that is eternal space. From there at the edge of the crape ring it is as though you were standing on a plain of golden dust, staring up into the face of destiny. The features of the face are plain, formed out of the whirling evanescent colors of the gases whipped around on the surface by cyclonic winds. You can see rainbows and pots of gold fashioned and then whipped away to change to greater things. The breath of eternal mystery blows on the spirit, and spacemen say you can see anything you desire.
The ship lurched this way and that as the jets kept it on its course, and Trase suddenly realized that the sickness had dropped away from him like a fetter. The ship headed back towards Titan for a refueling stop, but Trase sat there and stared at Saturn until the Astrodome got around to the front and the jet trails obscured the view at the rear. He was not sick while he looked at Saturn.
His clear-headedness lasted about half-an-hour. Then Trase got sick again. He was sick for a day and a half, until the ship began to come in on Titan.
But the drifter crew had hid out some Mercurian liquor and got drunk before landing. They failed to cut the jets. Irinia cursed until the spaceship bulkheads turned red hot, but she fell and knocked herself out running down from the pilot's compartment to the engine-room. And so there was the ship headed wide-open into Titan with the crew drunk, Irinia unconscious, and Trase dead-sick in his bunk.
Well, you'll know now that Trase saved the day. He began to think of Saturn as he had seen it. He staggered down to the engine-room, cut the jets, then ran up to the pilot's room where the rough surface of Titan stared him in the face. And he wasn't sick while he thought of Saturn.
The ship cracked up but nobody was killed. They hadn't been able to get any insurance with an unlicensed crew, so that left Trase flat-broke. He wasn't a veepee anymore since he had no stock in Air-Lanes, and Irinia got fired for taking the extended leave.
So things were kind of tough for a while, but.... Where are they now? Oh, you know, you've heard all about it. They found a backer, and now they're out on Pluto with a space-drive job, getting ready to set out for Centauri. And Trase has never been sick again.