The ship was cigar-shaped, about eighty feet long and twenty feet in diameter. It had been built so that in space, away from gravity, we could start it spinning with the small rockets and use centrifugal force to keep us on the deck, which lined the shell. There were ballast tanks to keep one side down when in a gravity field, the water ballast being transferred to the center tube tank before the spin was started, to transfer the center of mass of the ship to the axis of rotation.
We started early in the evening, heading into the east to take advantage of the thousand-mile-an-hour speed of the earth's surface.
The missing link, the hunk of tellecarbon, was encased in a polished brass case in the exact center of gravity of the ship, strong girders connecting it to the shell. A sound-proof booth surrounded it in which the operator would not be distracted. A panel of signal lights was immediately below it where the operator could see it without taking his eyes off the tellecarbon. When we took off I was in the driver's seat, Lahoma standing beside me. We had found that when she thought of hamburger sandwiches the tellecarbon became antigravitational, just as when I thought of chickens being killed.
It took the combined power of our thoughts to lift the ship. As we found out later, the ship rose sluggishly from the water and floated erratically upward, reaching the stratosphere in a little over an hour. By midnight we were over two thousand miles above the Earth's surface and rising more and more rapidly. By then both of us were exhausted and spelling each other off every ten minutes.
Jud was constantly determining our position and speed. At two o'clock in the morning he relieved Lahoma and concentrated on the tellecarbon to give us more forward speed. By eight o'clock in the morning our speed and direction of travel were correct for escape from the Earth's gravity field toward the planet Mars, and I crawled out of the control booth, practically a wreck.
From there on it was smooth sailing. We would coast along for two months before nearing Mars, and play with the gadgets we had brought along for taking all sorts of measurements in outer space.
Space is very different than most writers picture it. Instead of being dark it is intensely bright in all directions. It was fortunate that we had movable dark shields on each porthole. By varying the number over a porthole we could block out most of the light and keep our objective in view.
Our most amazing discovery was that the temperature of interplanetary space is not absolutely zero. Our outside thermostat, carefully shielded against all rays, that is, infrared, visible, and ultraviolet, and in the vacuum of space, showed a constant temperature of minus one hundred and three degrees F. at all times in outer space. Jud explained that this was probably due to x-rays and cosmic rays which could penetrate the protective shield.
On the fifty-eighth day after leaving the earth, Jud, at the forward telescope, became suddenly excited. Dashing from the telescope to the chart table he began scribbling figures, ignoring our queries as to what was wrong. After fifteen minutes of figuring he straightened up, a worried frown on his face.