"Thanks," I agreed.
The purser's cubby was unoccupied. I passed it, came to the stern end where the superstructure stopped and the side decks converged into a triangle of open deck under the dome at the pointed stern. There were a few passengers lounging around and deckhands moving at their tasks of uncradling the vessel which now was ready to take off. Over at a glassite bull's-eye window in the side pressure-wall, the big Martian, Set Mokk, was standing, gazing at the people on the lower stage.
And suddenly, from the shadow of a cargo-shifter near at hand, a blob of figure detached itself and moved away. In a moment the deck-light gleamed on it; a member of the crew—squat, bent, misshapen gargoyle shape; a hideous Earth-man hunchback, with dangling gorilla-like arms that swayed as he walked. Then I saw his face; ghastly countenance, lumped with disease, a mouth that seemed to leer and eyes with puckered rims—eyes that seemed to glare at me with impish malevolence as he shambled past me and vanished around the other side deck.
In a few minutes more, with a blast of sirens, the little X-87 trembled, lifted nose first from its cradle and was away, slanting up into the night. The lights of the giant city dropped beneath us. I stood at one of the side bull's-eyes watching them as they dwindled into a blob, merged with other lights of other cities along the coast.
I had been up into the stratosphere many times, of course, but this was to be my first flight into Interplanetary Space. I could envisage our gleaming silver vessel now, tiny little cylinder with pointed ends, alumite keel-bottom and the great rounded glassite dome on top, as we slid so swiftly up out of the atmosphere. A little world now to ourselves.
The little vessel pounded and quivered with the vibrations of its disintegrating atomic rocket-streams at the stern. Then as we slid into the upper reaches of the stratosphere, the rocket engines were silenced; the gravity-plates were de-insulated, set with Earth-repulsion as we swung toward the gleaming half-moon ahead and over our bow.
The ship was vibrationless now. All movement seemed detached from us. Alone in Space we seemed hovering, poised.
The voyage of doom had begun.
"Apparently you have not suffered from the miserable pressure sickness," Ollog Torio said. "Or have you, Set Mokk?"