A Company of Heroes Book Four: The Scientist by Ron Miller Page A

trip. What a fool thing to do: eating before the launch.”
    “It was just the shock,” she repeated. “Before I opened my eyes, I was dreaming about floating, like a, a fish. It was a very pleasant sensation.”
    “I rather like it myself,” agreed the professor, whose elongated body wavered bonelessly above her like a pennant or a strand of kelp. “If weightlessness is not otherwise proving a handicap to anyone, then I propose that we dispense with any attempt to create gravity artifically by rotating the cabin.”
    “Good,” said Hughenden. “I’ve maintained all along that the Coriolis forces in such a confined space would be disorienting at best and debilitating at worst. Our heads would be travelling at a substantially different speed than our feet. Every time we moved or bent over, we’d suffer severe attacks of vertigo or disorientation.”
    “Then please leave the cabin the way it is,” Bronwyn urged. “Where are we, anyway?”
    “Good question,” replied Wittenoom. “Somewhere about five hundred miles above the earth, I imagine.”
    “That’s a useful answer,” sneered the doctor. “That only limits us to being somewhere on the surface of a rapidly expanding imaginary sphere with an area, presently, of some 254,340,000 square miles.”
    “Did all of the rockets work as they should have?” Bronwyn asked. “I don’t remember hearing all of the stages firing.”
    “You wouldn’t have,” answered Hughenden. “We were travelling faster than our own sound.”
    “If the outer carapace fell away as it was supposed to, we can open the ports and see what we can see,” said Wittenoom.
    There were fifteen portholes: twelve spaced around the compartment’s circumference, just above the level of the couches, and three larger ports near the apex of the dome. Bolts held protective plates over the thick quartz windows. These were attacked with wrenches by the three astronauts; the panels fell into slots designed to receive them, where they locked into place. Immediately half a dozen dazzling, parallel beams of light cut diagonally across the interior of the compartment. Half a dozen brilliant circles or ellipses (depending upon the angle at which a particular beam struck the curving interior) were projected onto the opposite wall. These drifted almost imperceptibly as the spacecraft slowly rotated on its axis.
    “We’d best regularize the motion of the ship,” said Hughenden, “and get dark filters over the ports facing the sun. The crystal is opaque to infrared but it’s virtually transparent to ultraviolet. We don’t want that much radiation pouring into the cabin.”
    “Nor anyone accidentally looking at the sun,” agreed Wittenoom.
    “Oh! Look!” cried Bronwyn, pushing herself toward the ceiling. She caught hold of one of the many leather loops that decorated the interior of the spacecraft, something like the straps that adorn subway cars, and anchored herself beneath one of the large portholes. A portion of her mind amazed itself at how rapidly its owner had become accustomed to the almost moment-by-moment changes in orientation. As soon as she had grasped the handhold and placed her feet on either side of the port, squatting over the crystal disk, she no longer thought of herself as being on the ceiling but rather near the center of a dish-shaped floor. She had no difficulty in imagining that she was now looking down through the quartz-plugged opening.
    “Professor! Come look!”
    The three overhead portholes were each nearly eighteen inches in diameter and with her face pressed close to the almost invisible quartz surface, Bronwyn felt as though she were suspended in space like a fixed star. This must be what it feels like to be a constellation, with stars for eyes and comets for fingers and toes. The sky was black and, to her surprise, starless; even the brightest of the stars were lost as the glare of the nearby moon dazzled her eyes.
    The smaller of the earth’s two moons hovered