"I—I don't understand. My culture society, if it is important for some reason that you know...."
"Precisely. We've known for some time about the society, madame. We are sorry that we have at length linked you with it. Now if you will accompany us please."
There was no choice. She did not want to think of what might happen if she ran.
CHAPTER XIII
"Inside Venus compensation limit, sir. They've taken over. Inversion in three minutes; jet-down at NMHQ in twelve. Secondary check please, sergeant."
Space had been monotonous. After the first thrill of watching Earth grow smaller and smaller until it was nothing more than another planet in the heavens, after the realization that the studded blackness to each side was real, and not some gigantic planetarium show, the trip had been a seemingly motionless thing, like high flight in a light plane at less than cruising speed. They had licked the problem of weightlessness by an artificial gravity set-up which functioned, as far as he was able to find out from the captain, on a complex system of gyroscopes—but not even they furnished so much as a tremor to the deck plates, and he might as well have been planted firmly on Earth for all the sensation there was of movement. Even when inversion began, the gyro system automatically compensated for its inertia effects, and he would have been unaware of it had it not been for the series of oral checks between sergeant and captain, captain and the base on Venus.
Then suddenly, the second planet loomed large and white—it blotted out the blackness, and then there was no more blackness, and the telescreen seemed to be swimming in pea-soup fog.
"Six minutes, sir."
The syrupy whiteness seemed limitless and for a moment Doug felt little pangs of panic, of fear that they must be falling into a great pit to which there was no bottom, only the eternity of the falling itself. Then suddenly it was above them like a diffuse, infinite ceiling, receding quickly at first, then more slowly, more slowly....