He called home, spoke with his parents and kid brother, -and then put the telephone with things to be shipped. He was scratching his head over what remained when Burke came in. He grinned. 'Trying to swallow your penalty- weight?'
Till figure it out.'
'You don't have to leave that junk behind, you know.'
'Huh?'
'Ship it up to Terra Station, rent a locker, and store it. Then, when you go on liberty to the Station, you can bring back what you want. Sneak it aboard, if it's that sort of thing.' Matt made no comment; Burke went on, 'What's the matter, Galahad? Shocked at the notion of running contraband?'
'No. But I don't have a locker at Terra Station.'
'Well, if you're too cheap to rent one, you can ship the stuff to mine. You scratch me and I'll scratch you.'
'No, thanks.' He thought about expressing some things to the Terra Station post office, then discarded the idea- the rates were too high. He went' on sorting. He would keep his camera, but his micro kit would have to go, and his chessmen. Presently he had cut the list to what he hoped was twenty pounds; he took the stuff away to weigh it.
Reveille and breakfast were an hour early the next day. Shortly after breakfast the call-to-muster ran through Hay-worth Hall, to be followed by heart-quickening strains of 'Raise Ship!' Matt slung his jump bag over his shoulder and hurried down to the lower corridors. He pushed his way through a throng of excited youngster cadets and found his assigned area.
Muster was by squads and Matt was a temporary squad leader, as his name came first, alphabetically, in his squad. He had been, given a list; he reached into his pouch and had an agonizing moment of thinking he had left it up in his room before his fingers closed on it. 'Dodsworth!'
'Here.'
'Dunstan,'
'Here.'
He was still working through Frankel, Freund, and Funston when the oldster mustering the entire corridor shouted for him to report. He hurried to a conclusion, faced around, and saluted. 'Squad nineteen-all present!'
Someone tittered and Matt realized suddenly that he had used the scout salute, rather than the relaxed, open- palmed gesture of the Patrol. His cheeks burned.
A brassy amplified voice called out, 'AH deck parties report.' In turn, the oldster in Mart's corridor called out, 'Third deck party, all present.' When all reports were in there was a momentary silence, long enough for Matt to have a spine-tingling anticipation of what was to come. Would they? But they were doing so; the voice over the speaker called out: 'Dahlquist?'
Another voice-heard only through the speaker-replied, 'I answer for him.'
It went on, until the Four were mustered, whereupon the first voice stated, 'All present, sir.'
'Man the ship.'
They mounted a slidewalk, to step off in a large underground room, far out under Santa Barbara Field. There were eight large elevators arranged in a wide circle around the room. Matt and his squad were crowded into one of them and mounted to the surface. Up it went, much higher than had been necessary to enter the test-flight rocket, up and up, close by the huge bulk of the Bolivar.
It stopped and they trotted across the drawbridge into the ship. Inside the airlock stood a space-marines sergeant, gaudy and splendid who kept repeating, 'Seventh deck! Down the hatch to your own deck-step lively!' He pointed to the hatch, down which disappeared a narrow, vertical steel ladder.
Matt hitched his jump bag out of his way and lowered himself into the hatch, moving fast to avoid getting his fingers stepped on by the cadet who followed him. He lost track of the decks, but there was a sergeant master-at- arms on each. He got off when he heard, 'Third deck!'
He was in a wide, low cylindrical compartment, the deck of which was covered with plastic-foam padding. It ,was marked off in sections, each about seven feet by three and fitted with safety belts.
Matt found an unoccupied section, sat down, and waited. Presently cadets stopped dribbling in, the room was crowded. The master-at-arms called out, 'Down, everybody-one to a section.' He then counted them by noting that all sections were filled.
A loudspeaker warned, 'All hands, prepare for acceleration!' The sergeant told them to strap down and remained standing until all had done so. He then lay down, grasped two handholds, and reported the third deck ready.
'All hands, stand by to raise!' called out the speaker.
There was a long and breathless wait.
'Up ship!' shouted the speaker.
Matt felt himself pressed into the padding.
Terra Space Station and the school ship Randolph He in a circular orbit 22,300 miles above the surface of the Earth, where they circle the Earth in exactly twenty-four hours, the natural period of a body at that distance.
Since the Earth's rotation exactly matches their period, they face always one side of the Earth-the ninetieth western meridian, to be exact. Their orbit lies in the ecliptic, the plane of the Earth's orbit around the Sun, rather than in the plane of the Earth's equator. This results in them swinging north and south each day as seen from the earth. When it is noon in the Middle West, Terra Station and the Ran-
dolph lie over the Gulf of Mexico; at midnight they lie over the South Pacific.
The state of Colorado moves eastward about 830 miles per hour. Terra Station and the Randolph also move eastward nearly 7000 miles per hour- 1.93 miles per second, to be finicky. The pilot of the Bolivar had to arrive at the Randolph precisely matched in course and speed. To do this he must break his ship away from our heavy planet, throw her into an elliptical orbit just tangent to the circular orbit of the Randolph and with that tangency so exactly placed that, when he matched speeds, the two ships would lie relatively motionless although plunging ahead at two miles per second. This last maneuver was no easy matter like jockeying a copter over a landing platform, as the two speeds, unadjusted, would differ by 3000 miles an hour.
Getting the Bolivar from Colorado to the Randolph, and all other problems of journeying between the planets, are subject to precise and elegant mathematical solution under four laws formulated by the saintly, absent- minded Sir Isaac Newton nearly four centuries earlier than this flight of the Bolivar-the three Laws of Motion and the Law of Gravitation. These laws are simple; their application in space to get from where you are to where you want to be, at the correct time with the correct course and speed, is a nightmare of complicated, fussy computation.
The 'weight' pressing Matt into the padding was four gravities-Matt weighed nearly six hundred pounds. He lay there, breathing with difficulty, while the ship punched its way through the thick soup of air and out into free space. The heavy weight bound down the cadets while the Bolivar attained a speed of some six miles per second and climbed to an altitude of 900 miles.
At the end of five minutes and a few odd seconds the drive stopped.
Matt raised his head, while the sudden silence rang in his ears. The master-at-arms detected Mart's movement and others. He shouted, 'Stay where you are-don't move.'
Matt relaxed. They were in free fall, weightless, even though the Bolivar was speeding away from the Earth at more than 20,000 miles an hour. Each body-ship, planet, meteor, atom-in space falls continually. It moves also with whatever other motion it has inherited from its past experience.
Matt was acutely aware of his weightlessness, for his stomach told him about it, complainingly. To be on the safe side, he removed a sick kit from his jump bag, but he did not put it on. He was feeling queasy; it was not as bad as it had been on his test flight, not half as bad as the 'bumps.' He hoped to get by without losing his breakfast.
The loudspeaker sang out, 'End of acceleration. Four hours of free fall.' The master-at-arms sat up. 'You can unstrap now,' he said.
In a matter of seconds the compartment took on the look of a particularly crowded aquarium. One hundred boys were floating, swimming, squirming in every attitude and position between the deck and the overhead. These two barriers no longer seemed like floor and ceiling since up-and-down was gone; they were simply walls which rotated slowly and erratically for each observer as his own body turned past them.
'Hey, you guys!' yelled the sergeant. 'Grab on to something and listen to me.' Matt looked around, found himself near the overhead, spotted a handhold, and grasped it. 'It's time you kids learned some traffic rules for free flight.
