Birrel's heart pounded wildly and the blood in his veins turned cold and thin as water.
There was noise. A stunning, deafening crescendo of it. Then there was a feeling of motion. He lay on the top of a rising piston that pressed him slowly and relentlessly against air compressed into a smaller and smaller space. He opened his mouth and yelled in panic fear, seeing himself crushed into a flattened pulp. The cry was lost in the bursting roar that enveloped the ship. Ages passed. And then miraculously the pressure eased and finally was gone.
Thile's voice came suddenly from a speaker in the wall. "Trouble, Kara. Radar says another ship has taken off from Earth, right behind us."
Birrel heard her quick, fierce exclamation. "So Vannevan was watching his radar for our take-off. I knew he'd never let us get back to Ruun if he could help it!"
CHAPTER VII
They were all in the ship's bridge now. Thile and Kara and a young man named Vray were conferring tensely with the radarman and checking a bristling array of instruments.
Birrel was looking at space.
The ports on one side were shielded against the sun, so he couldn't see it. Earth was behind, or below them, so he couldn't see that either. All he could see was nothing, an infinity of it, without top or bottom, front or back, beginning or end. The stars floated in it, by the millions and billions, like shoals of fiery fish gleaming red and gold and blue and green, white and violet, orange and dull crimson. They were not crowded. There was plenty of room between them. The eye was drawn farther and farther into those distances and the body unconsciously tried to follow, until the mind recoiled from the edge of some psychic calamity and screamed for solidity. Birrel spun away from the port and grabbed hold of a stanchion and stood with his eyes shut, sweating and shaking as though he had just run a race.
Kara said, "It gets you, doesn't it?"