"It's because the control section's so close to the center," replied Jonner. "The station's spinning to maintain artificial gravity, and your feet are away from the center. As long as you're standing upright, the pull is straight up and down to you, but actually your feet are moving faster than your head, in a larger orbit. When you try to move, as in normal gravity, your body swings out of that line of pull and you nearly fall. The best corrective, I've found, is to lean backward slightly when you start to walk." As the two space captains walked back toward the wardroom together, Baat said: "Jonner, I hear the Mars Corporation offered you the _Marsward XVIII_ for this run first, and you turned them down. Why? You piloted the _Marsward V_ and the _Wayward Lady_ for Marscorp when those upstarts in the Argentine were trying to crack the Earth-Mars run. This Atom-Star couldn't have enough money to buy you away from Marscorp." "No, Marscorp offered me more," said Jonner, soberly now. "But this atomic drive is the future of space travel, Russo. Marscorp has it, but they're sitting on it because they've got their fingers in hydrazine interests here, and the atom drive will make hydrazine useless for space fuel. Unless I can break the franchise for Atom-Star, it may be a hundred years before we switch to the atom drive in space." "What the hell difference does that make to you?" asked Baat bluntly. "Hydrazine's expensive," replied Jonner. "Reaction mass isn't, and you use less of it. I was born on Mars, Russo. Mars is my home, and I want to see my people get the supplies they need from Earth at a reasonable transport cost, not pay through the nose for every packet of vegetable seed." They reached the wardroom door. "Too bad I have to degrav my old chief," said Baat, chuckling. "But I'm a rocket man, myself, and I say to hell with your hot-rod atom drive. I'm sorry you got deflected into this run, Jonner; you'll never break Marscorp's orbit." * * * * * The _Marsward XVIII_ was a huge vessel, the biggest the Mars Corporation ever had put into space. It was a collection of spheres and cylinders, joined together by a network of steel ties. Nearly 90% of its weight was fuel, for the one-way trip to Mars. Its competitor, the _Radiant Hope_, riding ten miles away in orbit around the Earth, was the strangest looking vessel ever to get clearance from a space station. It looked like a tug towing a barge. The tug was the atomic power plant. Two miles behind, attached by a thin cable, was the passenger compartment and cargo. On the control deck of the _Radiant Hope_, Jonner gripped a microphone and shouted profane instructions at the pilot of a squat ground-to-space rocket twenty miles away. T'an Li Cho, the ship's engineer, was peering out the port at the speck of light toward which Jonner was directing his wrath, while Qoqol, the Martian astrogator, worked at his charts on the other side of the deck.