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.
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