"Sure. That went on with the lights."
Darlange called for everyone in the ship to hold himself down, and then he tied his belt to the frame in front of the haywired panel. He opened the power on drivers 1 and 2, and the ship's floor surged ever so little.
"How're you going to know?" asked Hadley.
"I've got one eye on the gyrocompass," said Darlange. "When it stops turning, we're going straight. Then all we have to do is to set our bottom end along the line of flight and pack on the decel. Might as well do it that way since every MPS we can lose is to our advantage."
He snapped switches that added power to driver 3. Gradually the gyrocompass changed from a complex rotation-progression to a simpler pattern, and eventually the simple pattern died, leaving but one freedom of rotation. "I'm sort of stumped," grinned Darlange. "We're now hopping along, but rotating on our long axis. How we stop axial rotation with drivers set parallel to that axis I'll never guess."
"Is there a lifeship in working order?" asked Hadley.
"Sure."
"Tom, turn it against the rotation and apply the drivers on that until we tell you to stop."
An hour later the ship had ceased to turn. Then Darlange jockeyed the big ship around so that the bottom was along the line of flight. Then he set the power for a half-G, and everyone relaxed.
Ten minutes later Captain Johannson came in.