Cities in Flight

“Attention, please. We will be passing the Moon in one point two minutes. The observation blister is now open to passengers. Senator Wagoner requests the presence of Miss Abbott and Colonel Russell in the blister.”

There was no further sound from the ion-rockets, which had inexplicably been shut off when the Per Aspera could have been no more than 250 miles above the surface of the Earth. Yet she was passing the Moon now, without the slightest sensation of movement, though she must still be accelerating. What was driving her? Paige could hear nothing but the small hum of the ship’s electrical generator, no louder than it would have been on the ground, unburdened of the job of RF-heating the electron-ion plasma which the rockets used. Grimly, he unsnapped the last gripper from his harness, conscious of what a baby he evidently was on board this ship, and got up.

The deck felt solid and abnormal under his feet, pressing against the soles of his shoes with a smug terrestrial pressure of one unvarying gravity. Only the habits of caution of a service lifetime prevented him from running forward up the companionway to the observation blister.

Anne and Senator Wagoner were there, the dimming moonlight bathing their backs as they looked ahead into deep space. They had been more than a little shaken up by the take-off, that was obvious, but they were already almost recovered; compared to the effects of the normal ferry take-off, this could only have ruffled them; and of course the sudden transformation to the impossible one-gravity field would not have bollized their untrained reflexes with anything like the thoroughness that it had scrambled Paige’s long-conditioned reactions. Looked at this way, space-flight like this might well be easier for civilians than it would be for spacemen, at least for some years to come.

He padded cautiously toward them, feeling disastrously humbled. Shining between them was a brilliant, hard spot of yellow-white light, glaring into the blister through the thick, cosmics-proof glass. The spot was fixed and steady, as were all the stars looking into the blister; proof positive that the ship’s gravity was not being produced by axial spin. The yellow spot itself, shining between Wagoner’s elbow and Anne’s upper arm, was—

Jupiter.

On either side of the planet were two smaller bright dots; the four Galilean satellites, as widely separated to Paige’s naked eye as they would have looked on Earth through a telescope the size of Galileo’s.

While Paige hesitated in the doorway to the blister, the little spots that were Jupiter’s largest moons visibly drew apart from each other a little, until one of them went into occultation behind Anne’s right shoulder. The Per Aspera was still accelerating; it was driving toward Jupiter at a speed nothing in Paige’s experience could have prepared him for. Stunned, he made a very rough estimate in his head of the increase in parallax and tried to calculate the ship’s rate of approach from that.

The little lunar ferry, humming scarcely louder than a transformer for carrying five people—let alone ten—as far as SV-1, was now hurtling toward Jupiter at about a quarter of the speed of light.

At least forty thousand miles per second.

And the deepening color of Jupiter showed that the Per Aspera was still picking up speed.

“Come in, Colonel Russell,” Wagoner’s voice said, echoing slightly in the blister. “Come watch the show. We’ve been waiting for you.”

CHAPTER TEN: Jupiter V

That is precisely what common sense is for, to be jarred into uncommon sense. One of the chief services which mathematics has rendered the human race in the past century is to put ‘common sense’ where it belongs, on the topmost shelf next to the dusty canister labeled ‘discarded nonsense.’

—ERIC TEMPLE BELL

THE SHIP that landed as Helmuth was going on duty did nothing to lighten the load on his heart. In shape it was not distinguishable from any of the short-range ferries which covered the Jovian satellary circuit, carrying supplies from the regular SV-1-Mars-Belt-Jupiter X cruiser to the inner moons—and, sometimes, some years-old mail; but it was considerably bigger than the usual Jovian ferry, and it grounded its outsize mass on Jupiter V with only the briefest cough of rockets.