The rocket engines whined and shrieked into life. Alan and the pilot strapped themselves into blast chairs. The roar was deafening. Alan could feel his face contorted by eight G's pressure as the ancient spaceship blasted off. Then, his muscles bunched in agony, he blacked out.
Dazzling white with reflected sunlight but pock-marked with craters, shadowed with deep valleys and gorges, sundered by great rock faults, puckered with vast bleak mountain ranges the moon swept up at them.
"That reporter wants to see you now, Mr. Tremaine," the pilot told Alan.
"I haven't time for—what? What reporter?"
"The one President Holland sent along to cover the story for Earth."
"He didn't tell me—" Alan began, then shrugged. The reporter would be a nuisance, but it hardly mattered. "No interviews now," Alan said. "Tell him we're not going to land on the moon—yet. Tell him we're looking for the space-warp."
Gem-bright, unblinking, the stars of space gleamed through the viewport. Star-maps were spread on the floor of the small control cabin, crew members pouring over them. Somewhere out there, space should look different. Somewhere, starlight should be cut off by a narrow band of blackness—the space-warp. They had to find it, and they had to hurry. It made good sense to tell the Outworlders Alan had denounced Bennett Keifer as a traitor, for some of them might not fire on Alan's six small ships. But it also presented a danger: Keifer would probably abandon the hour of his ultimatum and rush ahead with his plans. They had mere minutes to find the space-warp. Perhaps already it was too late.
With the pilot taking over, Alan kneeled on the floor and studied the star-maps, calling out grid-coordinates while a man at the viewports checked them against space itself. Soon his head was swimming with the multitudes of white dots on the blueprint paper, with the white graph lines, the swarms of stars. "Sixteen-eleven," he said, "Deneb, Vega, Altair.... Sixteen-twelve, Pollux, Procyon, Sirius...."
"Check ... check...."