Murray Leinster (Duke Classic SiFi) by Operation: Outer Space Page A

to something and climb those stairs
if you want to see us go up! I'm going to be busy!"

Chapter Five
*
    The physical sensations of ascending to the ship's control-room were
weird in the extreme. Cochrane had just been wakened from a worn-out
sleep, and it was always startling on the moon to wake and find one's
self weighing one-sixth of normal. It took seconds to remember how one
got that way. But on the way up the stairs, Cochrane was further
confused by the fact that the ship was surging this way and swaying
that. It moved above the moon's surface to get over the tilted flat
Dabney field plate on the ground a hundred yards from the ship's
original position.
    The Dabney field, obviously, was not in being. The ship hovered on its
rockets. They had been designed to lift it off of Earth—and they
had—against six times the effective gravity here, and with an
acceleration of more gravities on top of that. So the ship rose lightly,
almost skittishly. When gyros turned to make it drift sidewise—as a
helicopter tilts in Earth's atmosphere—it fairly swooped to a new
position. Somebody jockeyed it this way and that.
    Cochrane got to the control-room by holding on with both hands to
railings. He was angry and appalled.
    The control-room was a hemisphere, with vertical vision-screens
picturing the stars overhead. Jones stood in an odd sort of harness
beside a set of control-switches that did not match the smoothly
designed other controls of the ship. He looked out of a plastic blister,
by which he could see around and below the ship. He made urgent signals
to a man Cochrane had never seen before, who sat in a strap-chair before
many other complex controls with his hands playing back and forth upon
them. A loudspeaker blatted unmusically. It was Dabney's voice, highly
agitated and uneasy.
    "
... my work for the advancement of science has been applied by other
minds. I need to specify that if the experiment now about to begin does
not succeed, it will not invalidate my discovery, which has been amply
verified by other means. It may be, indeed, that my discovery is so far
ahead of present engineering—.
"
    "See here!" raged Cochrane. "You can't take off with Babs on board! This
is dangerous!"
    Nobody paid any attention. Jones made frantic gestures to indicate the
most delicate of adjustments. The man in the strap-chair obeyed the
instruction with an absorbed attention. Jones suddenly threw a switch.
Something lighted, somewhere. There was a momentary throbbing sound
which was not quite a sound.
    "Take it away," said Jones in a flat voice.
    The man in the strap-chair pressed hard on the controls. Cochrane
glanced desperately out of one of the side ports. He saw the
moonscape—the frozen lava sea with its layer of whitish-tan moondust.
He saw many moon-jeeps gathered near, as if most of the population of
Lunar City had been gathered to watch this event. He saw the
extraordinary nearness of the moon's horizon.
    But it was the most momentary of glimpses. As he opened his mouth to
roar a protest, he felt the upward, curiously comforting thrust of
acceleration to one full Earth-gravity.
    The moonscape was snatched away from beneath the ship. It did not
descend. The ship did not seem to rise. The moon itself diminished and
vanished like a pricked bubble. The speed of its disappearance was
not—it specifically was not—attributable to one earth-gravity of lift
applied on a one-sixth-gravity moon.
    The loudspeaker hiccoughed and was silent. Cochrane uttered the roar he
had started before the added acceleration began. But it was useless. Out
the side-port, he saw the stars. They were not still and changeless and
winking, as they appeared from the moon. These stars seemed to stir
uneasily, to shift ever so slightly among themselves, like flecks of
bright color drifting on a breeze.
    Jones said in an interested voice:
    "Now we'll try the booster."
    He threw another switch. And again there was a momentary throbbing sound
which was not quite