But after a moment he looked first at his wife, than at Jak. "This is an order," he said seriously. "The minute any of you feel you can't take it any more, say so and we'll cut down, even if we do lose speed. I guess I went off half-cocked just now in saying that we had to win. Our health is more important...."
"Except yours, you're trying to say," Jak broke in. "You haven't been sparing yourself any, I notice, and I know enough doctoring to know you're not getting well as fast...."
"Pooh, I'm all right, and I'm used to ship accelerations." Mr. Carver turned his head toward his son and made himself grin. "Even under these three G's, I can still get up and lick you, even with a half-healed leg."
Jon realized at once that his father was warning him not to worry their mother any more, and forced himself to reply, pretending to be shamefaced, "Yes, sir, you could at that. I'll be good."
But the next morning, by the ship's chronoms, after they had fully awakened from a night of tortured sleep, Jon studied his instruments for some time, then reported to his father, "Bogin's still catching up. He's only about four hundred million behind us now."
"But how can he possibly be?" Jak demanded.
"Probably staying on three G's or better all the time," Jon answered.
"Or else he has a different means of propulsion than we have that affects his whole ship and contents, including crew," his father said slowly. "I don't know what it could be. But theoretically there are a lot of different ways of traveling faster than any we've learned how to use yet."
"But how could they, Mr. C.?" his wife gasped. "I don't pretend to know much about such things, but I thought that better fuels merely meant increased efficiency in the use of the engines, not an increase of speed. Isn't it acceleration that makes the speed faster?"
He turned his head with difficulty—at three gravities acceleration their apparent weight was tripled, and his body now "weighed" over five hundred and fifty pounds, instead of its normal one eighty plus!