Home! That was funny, to consider home, a place in space where gravity was furnished by an mechanogravitic warp, and where there were no windows to open, and where you lived in a cube of steel three thousand feet on a side, mostly filled with the items required for living plus the maze of equipment required to maintain the great lens that gave Pluto its sun.
Home! It was a far cry from his boyhood home on Venus, where the greenery of the forest fought with the very walls. But home is where you like it, and McBride liked it.
He wished that he were there, for he felt that Enid needed him.
Then with that perversity of nature that people call fate, a bellhop approached him and handed him a spacegram. McBride tipped the boy and opened the envelope easily. He'd been getting 'grams by round numbers for several years, and this was no novelty. He was not aware of its importance until he opened the folded page and read:
JOHN MC BRIDE
SATAN'S HOTEL
HELL, PLUTO
HIT SKY FOR HOME. ENID IN NO GREAT DANGER FROM FALL, BUT HER RECOVERY WILL BE ASSISTED BY YOUR PRESENCE.
CALDWELL.
McBride read the words twice, and then looked around himself, wildly. Hit Sky was easy to say—but at 6-G it would take just over one hundred hours to make the passage. Four days minimum!
McBride raced to the elevator, chewed his fingernails while the car rode him down the hundred and seven floors with that snail's pace caused by many stops. He shot out of the elevator door, caromed off the opposite wall into an ash tray which he upset and sent a small cascade of sand across the floor. McBride coasted to a stop before the hotel manager's desk and tossed the 'gram in front of him. The manager read and looked up in sympathy.
McBride said: "Get me a reservation on the next sunward-bound ship. Emergency stop; they'll make the stopoff with an emergency."