was picking out which wallpaper would look good on the spot in her house where she would nail my skinned pelt.'
Vanity shivered.
I could tell from the looks on the boys' faces that Colin thought Vanity was being a sissy; Quentin was more forgiving. He said, 'The Lady Phoebe may have known a weakness associated with the Phaeacian ability to feel that 'being watched' sensation. It is a sense impression of some sort. Why couldn't it be dazzled or deafened?'
Victor had put his prosthetic face back on, but his expression, as usual, was composed and dispassionate. 'In any case, we must decide our next course of action. We have no reason to believe the Huntress cannot follow us up out of the atmosphere. She is a moon goddess, after all.'
I said, 'Mars! Who here wants to go to Mars? We'll be famous!'
Victor said, 'Well, for one thing, people trying to hide should not be famous.'
'If the gods are so secretive, they might not be willing to strike out against famous people, right?' I pointed out.
Colin said sarcastically, 'Yeah, look at how well things turned out for famous guys like Agamemnon and Ajax and Oedipus and Icarus...'
I said, 'Listen! We're free for the first time in our lives, and now is our chance to spread our wings, to test our strength against the odds, to attempt bold things, to sail beyond the sunset!'
Colin grinned at that.
I looked at Quentin and said, 'To learn things never learned, to step where none have stepped, to fly higher than even the princes of the Middle Air.'
And to Victor I said, 'Even if she follows us up out of the atmosphere, then Phoebe might not be able to achieve escape velocity. If she cannot, then the whole solar system, the whole universe, is ours! What will we care then about the gods? What is Olympos but one small mountain on one small world?'
The motion was carried, and I found myself in the leadership position once again.
As they say, the devil is in the details. We need an Aristotelian paradigm in order to keep our air from going stale, but Aristotle did not allow for the Newtonian orbital mechanics we need to reach another planet.
We discussed whether we could merely turn one cabinet, or a small area of deck, into an Aristotelian vest-pocket cosmos, and pump our carbon dioxide into it, and pump out fresh air, without having that cabinet be pulled to Earth by its natural motion. Vanity, based on the results of her research back on the island, seemed to think having two non-harmonious laws of nature right next to each other might cause problems. Colin was urging Vanity to use her stone to summon up something more primitive, pre-Ptolemaic; His argument was that Stone Age shamans did not worry about or know how the sky- people breathed or moved. No one wanted to take Victor up on his offer to grow specially designed algae in our lungs that would allow us to breathe oxygen and carbon dioxide indifferently.
'Don't expeditions like this usually involve, you know, more planning... ?' asked Vanity. 'Like NASA and getting food and space suits and all sorts of stuff? We have the knapsacks of gear lashed to the deck, which is in a vacuum right now, I should mention.'
Victor said, 'I thought there were launch windows controlling the timing of space shots?'
I was bubbling with enthusiasm. 'Sure, Victor, there would be, if we were dealing with the rocket equation, and if conserving fuel were our main concern. In such a case, the most efficient method would be to begin from low Earth orbit, achieve a six-point-six kilometers per second delta-V, to put us into a Hohmann transfer ellipse, where its perihelion is tangential to Earth's orbit and its aphelion at Mars! In such a case, the next available launch date would be July ninth of this year, when Mars is past its closest approach by forty-five degrees, and the orbit out would take about two hundred fifty-nine days! After four hundred and fifty-five days on Mars, the planets would be in a good relative position, and we could make a second burn of seven point two kilometers per second! Let me show you how these figures are derived! First, remember that Kepler's third law states that for all objects orbiting the sun, the square of the orbital period is inversely proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis...'
Colin, who was pinned to the curved ceiling above me, groaned. 'Bat crap! She's talking in equations again! You've memorized the acceleration requirements for a Mars shot? Girl, you have thought about this entirely too much.'
I said impatiently, 'What else was there to think about, back when we were trapped in the orphanage, but how to get off the planet?'
'Wait, wait,' said Quentin, who was halfway up the wall to my left. 'Amelia, I mean, um, Leader, were you proposing we sail to Mars in a wooden boat for eight and a half months?'
Colin said, 'And we don't have a bathroom aboard.'
'Head,' I said. 'Aboard a ship, it's called a 'head.''
'Fine, we don't have one.'
Victor said, 'I assume we can use our special powers to overcome the need for oxygen at sea-level pressure, or do without food or water. But what about radiation from solar activity? The walls of this vessel are made of wood. I should not even mention the fuel supply, except Vanity, what does this ship use for fuel, anyhow? What makes it go?'
