Matt raised his head, while the sudden silence rang in his ears. The master-at-arms detected Mart's movement and others. He shouted, "Stay where you are-don't move."
Matt relaxed. They were in free fall, weightless, even though the Bolivar was speeding away from the Earth at more than 20,000 miles an hour. Each body-ship, planet, meteor, atom-in space falls continually. It moves also with whatever other motion it has inherited from its past experience.
Matt was acutely aware of his weightlessness, for his stomach told him about it, complainingly. To be on the safe side, he removed a sick kit from his jump bag, but he did not put it on. He was feeling queasy; it was not as bad as it had been on his test flight, not half as bad as the "bumps." He hoped to get by without losing his breakfast.
The loudspeaker sang out, "End of acceleration. Four hours of free fall." The master-at-arms sat up. "You can unstrap now," he said.
In a matter of seconds the compartment took on the look of a particularly crowded aquarium. One hundred boys were floating, swimming, squirming in every attitude and position between the deck and the overhead. These two barriers no longer seemed like floor and ceiling since up-and-down was gone; they were simply walls which rotated slowly and erratically for each observer as his own body turned past them.
"Hey, you guys!" yelled the sergeant. "Grab on to something and listen to me." Matt looked around, found himself near the overhead, spotted a handhold, and grasped it. "It's time you kids learned some traffic rules for free flight. You got to learn to zig when the other guy zags. If you happen to meet the Captain and you zig when you should 'a' zagged and bump him, he ain't going to like it. See?"
He stuck out a scarred thumb. "Rule one: all groundhogs -that's you and don't try to tell me anything different-are required to hold on with at least one hand at all times. That applies until you pass your free-fall acrobatics test. Rule two.- give way to officers and don't make them have to shout 'Gangway!' Besides that, give way to anybody on duty, or busy, or with his hands full.
"If you're moving aft, pass inboard of the man you meet, and contrariwise if you're moving forward. If you're moving clockwise, figuring 'clockwise' from the bow end of the ship, you pass the man you meet outboard and let him pass inboard- contrariwise for counterclockwise. No matter what direction you're going, if you overtake a man you pass inboard of him. Is that all clear?"
Matt thought it was, though he doubted if he could remember it. But a remaining possibility occurred to him. "Sergeant," he asked innocently, "suppose you're moving directly in or out from the center of the ship-what do you do?"
The sergeant looked disgusted, which gave his face an odd appearance to Matt, as their two faces were upside down with respect to each other. "You get what usually happens to jaywalkers-okay, so you're moving across the traffic: just stay out of everybody's way. It's your lookout. Any more questions?"