Rocket to Luna

And then, quite without warning, the rocket lurched ahead like an unleashed thunderbolt, its tail jets streaking fire, its nose slashing through the air as it roared up into the clouds.

Chapter 3 Space

It was worse than he ever imagined it could be. Far worse. At first he wanted to scream. He tried to open his mouth, but his jaw muscles didn’t seem to be working. He wondered about this, and he tried to lift his hand to touch his jaw, but something was holding his arm down tight against the foam-rubber cushion.

And then the force of acceleration got to work in earnest.

It pressed down on his body like a giant, mail-covered hand, pushing against his chest with suffocating force. He felt his back sink into the foam rubber, and there was a helpless feeling to the slow, sinking movement that made him want to cry out in panic. The only couch he could see from his position was Jack’s. He saw Jack’s body sinking into the cushion, and then Jack’s mouth popped open in an expression of sheer, raw pain. Sudden fear knifed its way up Ted’s spine as he anticipated the same ripping anguish Jack seemed to be experiencing.

The pain didn’t come. In its place, he felt the tremendous force clawing at the skin on his face, stretching it tight against his skull, pulling his lips back over his teeth, twisting his features into a horrible mask.

He sank deeper and deeper into the foam rubber, the roar of the rockets echoing in his ears. He tried to focus the picture in the radar screen overhead, wondering why it had suddenly become so blurred. Behind the screen, the metal overhead seemed to tilt at a crazy angle, and the cabin seemed to be growing darker. Ted’s mind felt fuzzy, and he wanted to shake his head in an effort to clear the dizziness that was invading his skull. But there were tight metal bands holding his head to the couch, it seemed: formidable bands of steel that forbade movement of any kind.

The blackness struck swiftly, without warning. It seemed to grow in the center of his skull, starting as a small dot and bursting into complete blackness in the space of a heartbeat.

He didn’t fight it.

He allowed it to claim his mind and his body completely as he drifted off into complacent nothingness.

It was quiet.

There was no longer the screaming wail of the jets, no longer the trembling fury of the bulkheads vibrating to the pound of the engines.

He blinked his eyes and stared up at the overhead. Tentatively, like a blind man testing his next step, Ted moved the fingers on his right hand, then the hand itself, then his arm. Across the aisle, Jack was unbuckling his safety belt and sitting up. Ted sat up, too, waved his arm, and weakly said, “Hi.”

Jack grunted, swung his legs over the side of the couch, and pushed against the cushion with his arms.

Slowly, easily, like a balloon drifting over roof tops, he floated across the cabin.

For a moment, Ted forgot all his Academy learning, and his eyes opened wide in honest surprise. He almost said, “Hey, you’re floating!” He realized then that the jets had probably been inactive for a long while now, and as a result, everything in the ship was weightless.

Jack cruised closer, an expression of pain still on his features, as if it had somehow been etched there when the ship started accelerating. Ted unbuckled his belt, anxious to experience the sensation of weightlessness.

“You’d better take it easy at first,” Jack warned. “Most lubbers shove off so hard they crack a few ribs against the bulkheads.”

Ted put his palm against the cushion and gave a small push. He floated off the couch, a delighted smile on his face.

“It feels funny,” he said.

Jack nodded solicitously.

“How do I get down?” Ted wanted to know.

“Down where?” Jack asked. “You’re in space, my friend. No ups or downs here, remember?”

Ted felt a slow flush seep onto his face. Jack seemed to have acquired the knack of making him feel small and foolish, and he wondered whether Jack had changed since he left the Academy, or whether he’d always been that way.

“Everybody up and kicking?” a voice asked.

Ted looked down to see Captain Merola swinging his legs over the side of the couch. The other members of the crew were beginning to stir now, and from Ted’s floating vantage point, he got his first good look at them.

Dr. Gehardt sat up abruptly in the second couch on the port side. He was small and fragile-looking, with a partially bald head saved from complete nakedness by a white fringe circling the back of his skull and continuing up around his ears. Something like the rings around Saturn, Ted thought. The geologist’s nose was short, a stub that perched like a button between intense brown eyes that opened wide now and stared around the cabin.

“The engines?” he asked. “Is there something wrong?”

Merola glanced up, holding tight to the cushion of his couch. “How do you mean, Doc.”