The lines to the driver tubes were scrambled, and the ship shuddered and drove forward at 10-G. An inertia switch tried to function, but the resetting solenoid had become shorted across the main battery and the weight could not drop.
Air doors clanged shut, closing the central well from the rest of the ship and effectively sealing the well from the crew.
The lights in the ship flickered and died. The cable's shorted lines grew hot and fire crept along its length and threatened the continuity. The heat opened fire-quenching vents and a cloud of CO2, emerged together with some of the liquid gas itself. The gas quenched the fire and the cold liquid cooled the cable. Fuses blew in the shorted circuits—
And the Solar Queen continued to plunge on and on at 10-G; the maximum possible out of her driving system.
The only man who remained aware of himself aboard the Solar Queen was the man who was filled with gravanol and adhesive tape. No other person expected to be hammered down by high acceleration. Only Channing, who was planning to leave Terra in his own little scooter, was prepared to withstand high G. He, with his characteristic hate of doing anything slowly, was ready to make the Terra to Venus Equilateral passage at 5- or 6-G.
It might as well have caught him, too. With all of the rest unconscious, hurt, or dead, he was alone and firmly fastened to the floor of the salon under eighteen hundred pounds of his own, helpless weight.
And as the hours passed, the Solar Queen was driving farther and farther from the imaginary spot that was the focus of the communicator beams from Venus Equilateral.
The newly-replaced cathodes in the driving tubes were capable of driving the ship for about two hundred G-hours at 1-G, before exhaustion to the point of necessary replacement for safety purposes. The proportion is not linear, nor is it a square-law, but roughly it lies in the region just above linear, so that the Solar Queen drove on and on through space for ten hours at 10-G before the cathodes died for want of emitting surface. They died, not at once, but in irregular succession so that when the last erg of power was gone from the ship it was zooming on a straight line tangent from its point of collision but rolling in a wild gyration through the void.
And twenty-five hundred miles per second added to her initial velocity of eleven hundred miles per second added up to thirty-six hundred miles per second. She should have had about seventy-five million miles to go at 2-G, to reach Terra in thirty hours from the halfway point where she turned ends to go into deceleration. Instead, the Solar Queen after ten hours of misdirected 10-G acceleration was thirty million miles on her way, or about halfway to Terra. Three hours later, driving free, the Solar Queen was passing Terra, having missed the planet by a few million miles.
Back in space, at an imaginary junction between the beams from Venus Equilateral and the course registered for the Solar Queen, Arden Channing's latest message was indicating all sorts of mild punishment for her husband when she got him home.