Futures Past by James White

Author:James White
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-01-21T07:00:00+00:00

FAST TRIP

WITH the sounding of the five second warning the clicking, whining bedlam inside Ramsey built suddenly to a climax. The chemical boosters fired, their thunder so deep and vast that it was felt in the bones rather than heard with overloaded ears, and the ship began creeping into the sky. It picked up speed rapidly until airflow over its fins began to assist the gyros in maintaining vertical stability, until it began to outstrip its own thunder and until five gravities of acceleration and a surprisingly few minutes of time had combined to hurl it accurately into space. Then just before the booster stage was due to fall away the ship's reactor cut in smoothly, augmenting the enormous pre-burnout thrust with its modest half-G.

That was when it happened.

The radio unit which was attached to a bulkhead a few feet above the pilot's position tore loose and dropped onto the couch below, then rolled off and snapped through the open well of the passenger compartment as if pulled by a giant elastic band. The passenger lounge was twenty-five-feet long and with our five Gs acting on it the small, metal cabinet gained enough velocity to crash through the transparent panel which looked into the cargo space without even slowing down. Here it was deflected by cargo into the food storage compartment where it left the ship via a large, ragged hole it had torn in the hull plating.

On time to the split second the booster stage dropped away and Ramsey, outwardly unaffected by these internal disturbances, continued along its precalculated flight path. After seventeen minutes at one-half G the reactor shut down and the ship was precisely on the course which would place it in orbit around Mars in a little over sixteen weeks. The fact that something had happened to the radio would not become apparent until the captain failed to make his post takeoff check report and, because it was the radio that had gone, the people on the ground would not know that anything else was amiss. So far as they were concerned, Ramsey was pointed in the right direction and everything was Go.

For a time the ship's passengers had the same comforting idea. All except one....

Herdman knew immediately that they had lost pressure by the change in the sounds which the ship was making— he was hearing them via the fabric of his couch and helmet rather than through the air of the passenger lounge—• and by the way his spacesuit creaked. A leak was not a very rare occurrence during the period of maximum stress that was takeoff and, provided it was not the product of some more serious malfunction, loss of pressure was nothing to worry about. The ship's air regeneration system would not be activated until after the captain had checked that everything was sealed tight, so that all they had lost was a few cubic meters of the dusty, peroxide-smelling air which had come aboard with the passengers before takeoff. Herdman waited tensely for something more calamitous to happen, and when it didn't he began to relax.

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