She said, "How long does this trip take anyway?"
Joanna's jaw dropped and her black-satin hair gleamed with liquid highlights as she shook her head. "Crehut, you are green!" she exclaimed. Then, assuming sociability with an effort, "You're mighty pretty though. The trip takes a little more than one Earth-day."
"Thanks—I see," replied Lynne. She felt she was beginning to see a lot of things. Along with her archaic ideas about the rigors of a space-ship takeoff, she had apparently retained some mighty obsolete theories about the speed of space-travel, at least on the Earth-Mars run. In her mind it was a matter of weeks if not months, depending upon the relative positions of the two planets.
A little over one Earth-day—if her growing feeling that she was the victim or core of some vast unseen conspiracy were correct, then there would have been plenty of time for Rolf to be summoned from Mars after her non-variant answers had given the brain-station bosses the clue to her newly-developed telepathic powers.
But why all the secrecy? It didn't take her long to find an answer. Had she been asked immediately to come to Mars she would have refused point-blank to make the trip. Her conditioning, her whole life would have forced her to reply in the negative.
So Rolf Marcein had been sent for with orders to make her want to leave Earth with him, by fair means or foul. And he had not hesitated to employ the foul. She felt her whole body blush as she recalled some of the brazen suggestions he had made, some of her responses, especially to his embraces earlier that evening.
It was going to be a very interesting session, she decided, as she followed the girl into the single small but beautifully compact central lounge or saloon that space requirements permitted on the Mars-ship. She looked around but failed to see his tall figure and saturnine face—treacherous face, she thought—among the half-dozen passengers already reclining in plastolounges, watching the amazing panorama projected on the ceiling from the viewplate recorders in the prow and stern of the huge space-vessel.
She followed Joanna to a chair, tried to share the girl's tremulous excitement. After all, she thought, she had felt much the same on emerging from the seminary to take her first position as a data-recording supplement for the biggest of all cybernetics machines, the "brain" that occupied six thousand acres of the Sahara Desert.
"Look!" the girl whispered enthusiastically. "There's X-Three, the last of the derelict space-stations."
Lynne watched the oddly complex structure, that resembled a pair of unrooted pyramids fastened point to point, as it revolved slowly across and out of the plane of vision.