To the Venusian space-navigators the trip was, perhaps, one of little moment. It passed smoothly, serenely, and without untoward incident. To the passengers who spent their waking hours dining and gaming, the trip may have been unexciting. To the workmen who performed mysterious functions deep within the bowels of the ship the trip may have seemed but hours of drudgery. But to Stephen Duane the trip was ten days of nerve-tingling adventure. Excitement stirring every sense, emotion and brain-fibre.
First, there was that never-to-be-forgotten moment when, led to the Observatory Deck by a junior officer eager to win a good place in the graces of the mock Daan "nobleman," Steve looked out upon that which every imaginative human has dreamed of some day beholding: the starry firmament of space as viewed from the void itself.
Stephen Duane was stricken speechless by the majesty of this sight. Here was no scattered handful of stars sprinkling the black emptiness like a sparse shaking of mica upon velvet. Here was a glorious backdrop of color, radiant, pulsating, gleaming with hues which shamed the efforts of the most daring rainbow. Clear of the encumbrance of Earth's blanketing atmosphere, the stars became tremendous globes burning hotly, fiercely, in the celestial vault. Flanking them on every side, forming a webwork so closely woven as to stagger the mind with its intricateness, were millions ... billions ... of myriad flaming companions.
Behind the Oalumuo lay the blue-green orb of Earth, studded with the whirling coronet of its tiny lunar companion. Before, looming larger with each passing hour of flight, was the gleaming-white birthplace of the races of Daans. Elsewhere circling the solar giant which dominated the segment of space could be seen, methodically plodding their ordained courses, the other planets of Sol's family. Red Mars and mighty Jupiter ... ringed Saturn and far, frozen Uranus.
It was a sight to humble the proudest human. Seeing it, tiring never of its ever-changing splendor, Steve Duane renewed to himself his vow that he would do everything within his power to reclaim for an enslaved humanity the right to share in the glories of this celestial empire.
But he saw not only beauty on the trip. He studied other things more practical, as well. Under the guidance of young Thaamo, his space-mariner friend, he spent long days in traversing the Oalumuo from stem to stern, from control-room to jet-chambers.
Much of what he saw upon these visits he did not completely understand. That was only natural. Not in a day nor a decade had the Daans solved the secret of space-travel. It lay within the power of no single brain to instantaneously comprehend mechanisms which had taken a hundred brains to invent, a thousand hands to build.
But Stephen Duane was, or had been, a scientist—and a brilliant one. He had that type of mind which, though it necessarily ignored details at the moment unsolveable, grasped prime essentials swiftly and surely.
On the more important points Steve centered his attention. He learned that the motors propelling the ship were atomic motors, and by deft questioning learned how that long-sought power had been harnessed by the Venusians. He studied the controls so carefully that in an emergency he might have taken his seat at the pilot's studs ... mentally blueprinted the general layout of the craft so that in days to come he might know in rude outline the sort of ship earthmen must build were they to go space-vagabonding.