Then he touched the controls, feeling the surge of power as his ship, an SP47, responded, hearing the subsonic vibration around him as atoms broke into little bits in the fission chambers of the rockets and spewed out of them into space.
The G needle moved past three, past four, past five. It moved into the part of the dial where the glossy white changed to pink. It crept slowly toward the darker pink, toward the deep red.
I don't WANT an ice cream cone. It was his sister's voice, real as audible sound. He had been six years old when she had said that, back in Springfield.
The voices came. The images came. Vivid and unimaginative. True reproductions. That's what acceleration did to the brain. It squeezed the juice out of brain cells into nerve networks. It could get you—
Larry jerked back to an awareness of what he was doing. Sweating, he coaxed the G needle back down a little. Not much.
It had been close. Why had he done it? Fear. He could let himself realize that, now that he was alone. Fear of a robot that had stolen a ship and gone out into space, when robots only obeyed orders. It was an instinctive thing, bred in all men for generations.
You ought to be whipped! That was dad. Good old dad. Larry had been about nine then. He had run away—hitchhiked four hundred miles to watch a spaceship leave the ground and climb up out of sight.
Pip-pip, pip-pip, pip-pip.
Larry lifted his fingers from the controls gradually in response to the signal from the board. The G needle dropped back into the white.
The voices were gone, the images, the thoughts. He grinned on one side of his face. This was the end of the radar line. Now his work would begin. Around his ship charged ions were streaming past. Some of them would have come from the junk ship.