What he saw there was precisely what he expected to see. There was Dorothy Gilbert, curled in a spring-hammock, reading a book. Nick was looking over’ her shoulder before she knew he had entered.
“Bodie’s ‘Parecliptic Orbits,’ ” he read aloud. “Dorothy, don’t you ever think of anything but your job?”
She looked up, smiling, brushing aside a lock of tousled hair that sought her eye. “Often, Nick. But where would we be if I didn’t check my courses against those plotted by a competent authority?”
“Just about where we’ll be if you do,” he guessed, tugging at his ear with long, knobby fingers. “You’re my idea of a competent authority yourself.”
“Thanks, Nick. How are the contracels holding out?”
“Wonderfully!” he grinned. “It seems as if my father did a fair job of inventing there—though maybe not quite good enough.” He knelt and touched a button inset in the floor; instantly the metallic luster of it dulled and clouded, then the clouds seemed to vanish as the floor became transparent. In an instant it appeared to have vanished entirely, revealing an immense sweep of blackness interspersed with white-hot, tiny specks of light that were stars and planets.
Nick stared out at them. The whole field of stars was moving, it seemed, though, in actuality, it was the ship itself that spun on its axis, providing them with the illusion of gravity they required. It was hard for Hartnett to realize that this view was almost brand-new to human eyes, that only twenty or thirty people could ever have seen stars and the solar system from this vantage point, outside the plane of the ecliptic. There were seven persons in the Columbia now, and there had been eighteen or twenty in its predecessor which had been reported lost some years before. Those two ships, the only ones in the System’s great armada to be equipped with the counter-acceleration devices that made it possible to venture out of the confines of the Solar System, were also the only ones to leave the plane of the ecliptic.
“Where’s Earth?” Nick asked absently without looking up.
Dorothy closed the book on a finger and leaned over the edge of the hammock to look. “It’s not in sight now,” she said. “Wait until we spin a little farther. Of course, I can’t guarantee you’ll be able to see it then, either, because the ship may hide it. But we’ll see. We’re looking out one side of the ship and Earth is directly in back of us.”
He snapped off the vision and the floor returned to normal. “As soon as we get the reports from the two goops,” he mused, “we can start making definite plans for the outing.”