"I know it worked!" sputtered Cochrane. "But--where are we? How far did
we come?"
"I haven't the least idea," said Jones mildly as before. "Does it
matter?"
Cochrane glared at him. Then he realized how completely too late it was
to protest anything.
The man he had seen absorbed in the handling of controls now lifted his
hands from the board. The rockets died. There was a vast silence, and
weightlessness. Cochrane weighed nothing. This was free flight
again--like practically all of the ninety-odd hours from the space
platform to the moon. The pilot left the controls and in an accustomed
fashion soared to a port on the opposite side of the room. He gazed out,
and then behind, and said in a tone of astonished satisfaction:
"This is good!--There's the sun!"
"How far?" asked Jones.
"It's fifth magnitude," said the pilot happily. "We really did pile on
the horses!"
Jones looked momentarily pleased again. Cochrane said in a voice that
even to himself sounded outraged:
"You mean the sun's a fifth-magnitude star from here? What the devil
happened?"
"Booster," said Jones, nearly with enthusiasm. "When the field was just
a radiation speed-up, I used forty milliamperes of current to the square
centimetre of field-plate.
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