Bailey's face was dripping. He grabbed the skipper. "I'm falling! Hold me!"
... Thousands of eyes bulged, hands twitched ...
DiCredico squeezed a plastic bottle, squirting water into his face. Drops spattered and drifted off slowly through the air. Bailey blinked and stared. He was aboard the Ranger. Safe. Then panic came gibbering back at him as his body told him unmistakably he was falling.
"You're not!" snapped DiCredico. "No gravity, remember? Spin ship!" he ordered over his shoulder.
Gently, Bailey's body felt the reassuring tug as centrifugal force duplicated a light gravity and the alarm bells in his nerves and glands stopped ringing. The hull of the ship became "down," and men walked instead of floating—walked on the walls and ceiling, too, like wheel-spokes radiating from the axis of spin.
"Over it?" asked DiCredico.
"I guess so. I'm sorry."
"Happens to all of us. Human body is made with a built-in, full-scale emergency response to falling—and lack of gravity is what triggers it. When you're awake you can consciously control it. I'm going to have to quit spinning ship now—can't take bearings, and this slant-standing can be worse than no gravity."
The substitute gravity faded and Bailey's body tried to panic again, but he reined it in firmly. He went forward to watch television. It was the same canned show he'd seen ten times already. And the canned radio show was one he hadn't liked in the first place. The Service did its best to make a ship a synthetic, miniature Earth—but it couldn't. Ten months already—maybe a year more. Plenty of people blew their stacks. A wonder they all didn't. Would he?
Like black, bad blood, a pulse of fear in Bailey's mind.