And as the hours passed, the Ariadne 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 one 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 Ariadne drove on and on through space for ten hours at ten 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 drivers 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 summed up to thirty-six hundred miles per second. She should have had about seventy-five million miles to go at minus two G to reach Terra in thirty hours from the halfway point, where she turned ends to go into deceleration. Instead, the Ariadne after ten hours of misdirected ten-G acceleration was thirty million miles on her way, or about halfway to Terra. Three hours later, driving free, the Ariadne was passing Terra, having missed the planet by several million miles.
Back in space, at a no longer existent junction between the beams from Venus Equilateral and the Ariadne, Arden Channing's latest message was indicating all sorts of minor punishment for her husband when she got him home.
By the time that the Ariadne should have been dropping out of the sky at Mojave Spaceport, the ship would be one hundred and ninety million miles beyond Terra and flirting with the imaginary line that marked the orbit of Mars.
That would be in seventeen hours.
Weightless, Channing pursued a crazy course in the salon of the spinning ship. He ached all over from the pressure, but the gravanol had kept his head clear and the adhesive tape had kept his body intact. He squirmed around in the dimness and could see the inert figures of the rest of the people who had occupied the salon at the time of the mishap. He became sick. Violence was not a part of Channing's nature—at least he confined his violence to those against whom he required defense. But he knew that many of those people who pursued aimless orbits in the midair of the salon with him would never set foot on solidness again.
He wondered how many broken bones there were among those who had lived through the ordeal. He wondered if the medical staff of one doctor and two nurses could cope with it.
Then he wondered what difference it made, if they were to go on and on? Channing had a rough idea of what had happened. He knew something about the conditions under which they had been traveling, how long, and in what direction. It staggered him, the figures he calculated in his mind. It behooved him to do something.
He bumped an inert figure and grabbed. One hand took the back of the head and came away wet and sticky. Channing retched, and then threw the inert man from him. He coasted back against a wall, and caught a handrail. Hand-over-hand he went to the door and into the hall. Down the hall he went to the passengers' elevator shaft, and with no thought of what his action would have been on any planet, Channing opened the door and dove down the shaft for several decks. He emerged and headed for the sick ward.