The Currents of Space by Isaac Asimov Page B

were his marbles, and the nebulae were cobwebs to brush away.
    He was on a ship! Memories rushed back continuously in a long flood and others left to make room. He was forgetting the kyrt fields and the mill and Valona crooning to him in the dark. They were only momentary breaks in a pattern that was now returning with its raveled ends slowly knitting.
    It was the ship!
    If they had put him on a ship long ago, he wouldn’t have had to wait so long for his burnt-out brain cells to heal themselves.
    He spoke softly to Valona in the darkness. “Now don’t worry. You’ll feel a vibration and hear a noise but that will be just the motors. There’ll be a heavy weight on you. That’s acceleration.”
    There was no common Florinian word for the concept and he used another word for it, one that came easily to mind. Valona did not understand.
    She said, “Will it hurt?”
    He said, “It will be very uncomfortable, because we don’t have anti-acceleration gear to take up the pressure, but it won’t last. Just stand against this wall, and when you feel yourself being pushed against it, relax. See, it’s beginning.”
    He had picked the right wall, and as the thrumming of the thrusting hyperatomics swelled, the apparent gravity shifted,and what had been a vertical wall seemed to grow more and more diagonal.
    Valona whimpered once, then lapsed into a hard-breathing silence. Their throats rasped as their chest walls, unprotected by straps and hydraulic absorbers, labored to free their lungs sufficiently for just a little air intake.
    Rik managed to pant out words, any words that might let Valona know he was there and ease the terrible fear of the unknown that he knew must be filling her. It was only a ship, only a wonderful ship; but she had never been on a ship before.
    He said, “There’s the jump, of course, when we go through hyperspace and cut across most of the distance between the stars all at once. That won’t bother you at all. You won’t even know it happened. It’s nothing compared to this. Just a little twitch in your insides and it’s over.” He got the words out syllable by grunted syllable. It took a long time.
    Slowly, the weight on their chests lifted and the invisible chain holding them to the wall stretched and dropped off. They fell, panting, to the floor.
    Finally Valona said, “Are you hurt, Rik?”
    “I, hurt?” He managed a laugh. He had not caught his breath yet, but he laughed at the thought that he could be hurt on a ship.
    He said, “I lived on a ship for years once. I didn’t land on a planet for months at a time.”
    “Why?” she asked. She had crawled closer and put a hand to his cheek, making sure he was there.
    He put his arm about her shoulder, and she rested within it quietly, accepting the reversal.
    “Why?” she asked.
    Rik could not remember why. He had done it; he had hated to land on a planet. For some reason it had been necessary to stay in space, but he could not remember why. Again he dodged the gap.
    He said, “I had a job.”
    “Yes,” she said. “You analyzed Nothing.”
    “That’s right.” He was pleased. “That’s exactly what I did. Do you know what that means?”
    “No.”
    He didn’t expect her to understand, but he had to talk. He had to revel in memory, to delight drunkenly in the fact that he could call up past facts at the flick of a mental finger.
    He said, “You see, all the material in the universe is made up of a hundred different kinds of substances. We call those substances elements. Iron and copper are elements.”
    “I thought they were metals.”
    “So they are, and elements too. Also oxygen, and nitrogen, carbon and palladium. Most important of all, hydrogen and helium. They’re the simplest and most common.”
    “I never heard of those,” Valona said wistfully.
    “Ninety-five per cent of the universe is hydrogen and most of the rest is helium. Even space.”
    “I was once told,” said Valona, “that space was a vacuum. They said