Travellers were
treated pretty much like parcels, these days. Travel, like television
entertainment and most of the other facilities of human life, was
designed for the seventy-to-ninety-per-cent of the human race whose
likes and dislikes and predilections could be learned exactly by
surveys. Anybody who didn't like what everybody liked, or didn't react
like everybody reacted, was subject to annoyances. Cochrane resigned
himself to them.
The red light-letters changed again, considerably later. This time they
said: "_Free flight, thirty seconds._"
They did not say "free fall," which was the technical term for a rocket
coasting upward or downward in space. But Cochrane braced himself, and
his stomach-muscles were tense when the rockets stopped again and stayed
off. The sensation of continuous fall began. An electronic speaker
beside his chair began to speak. There were other such mechanisms beside
each other passenger-chair, and the interior of the rocket filled with a
soft murmur which was sardonically like choral recitation.
"_The sensation of weightlessness you now experience_," said the voice
soothingly, "_is natural at this stage of your flight.
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