Orville closed his eyes. Something was crossing and crisscrossing inside him like two rings tossed back and forth by jugglers. It was not painful, but it was disturbing. Something must be going wrong. He didn't trust Harold's mechanical ability. In the past ten years, Harold had been fired from a couple of filling station jobs because of blunders, once for leaving the plug out of a crank case, and once for botching up a flat tire repair.
"Running kind of rough, isn't she?" Orville said. "What makes this little—" He circled his hands sickly in front of his stomach.
Harold closed his eyes and made similar circles. "Oh, that's this counter-grav of mine. You see, the gravitation of the Earth—"
"Can't you do anything about it?" Orville was in no mood to listen to one of Harold's lectures.
"I could move her over so we couldn't feel it, but it would be shaking the ship then. Might tear it apart."
"Won't it tear us apart?"
"I don't think so. We got more give to us than the ship has." Harold was able to drink the coffee now. "No, I don't think I've done a bad job on this. First time a machine is built, you're bound to run into a few bugs. But this is working, so far, even better than I expected."
"Yeah," Orville had to admit, "it ain't bad—for a guy with no mechanical ability whatever."
II
Harold had opened the ship up a little more, and according to him, they were now moving eighteen thousand miles per hour or so, approximately. Orville had tried to drink some water from a milk bottle, but the sight of the water, bouncing in rhythm to the invisible circles in his stomach, had given him nausea.