Alan looked at it with pride—a slender dark-green needle yearning to pierce the void. He wandered around the spaceport and heard the fuelers and oilers discussing it in reverent tones.
"That's a mighty fine piece of ship, that green one out there. Some lucky fellow's got it."
Alan wanted to go over to them and tell them, "That's my ship. Me. Alan Donnell." But he knew they would only laugh. Tall boys not quite nineteen did not own late-model Spacemasters with price-tags of cr. 225,000.
He itched to get off-planet with it, but there were more delays. He needed a flight ticket, first, and even though he had had the necessary grounding in astrogation technique and spacepiloting as an automatic part of his education aboard the Valhalla, he was rusty, and needed a refresher course that took six weary months.
After that came the physical exams and the mental checkup and everything else. Alan fumed at the delay, but he knew it was necessary. A spaceship, even a small private one, was a dangerous weapon in unskilled hands. An out-of-control spaceship that came crashing to Earth at high velocity could kill millions; the shock wave might flatten fifty square miles. So no one was allowed up in a spaceship of any kind without a flight ticket—and you had to work to win your ticket.
It came through, finally, in June of 3879, a month after Alan's twentieth birthday. By that time he had computed and recomputed his orbit to Venus a hundred different times.
Three years had gone by since he last had been aboard a spaceship, and that had been the Valhalla. His childhood and adolescence now seemed like a hazy dream to him, far in the back of his mind. The Valhalla, with his father and Steve and all the friends of his youth aboard, was three years out from Earth—with seven years yet to go before it reached Procyon, its destination.
Of course, the Crew had experienced only about four weeks, thanks to the Fitzgerald Contraction. To the Valhalla people only a month had passed since Alan had left them, while he had gone through three years.
He had grown up, in those three years. He knew where he was heading, now, and nothing frightened him. He understood people. And he had one great goal which was coming closer and closer with each passing month.
Blastoff day was the fifth of September, 3879. The orbit Alan finally settled on was a six-day trip at low acceleration across the 40,000,000-odd miles that separated Earth from Venus.