Immediately, as the contragravity field dropped below the specific
gravity of the ship, she began submerging. I got up into the conning
tower in time to see the water of the boat pool come up over the
armor-glass windows and the outside lights come on. For a few minutes,
the _Javelin_ swung slowly and moved forward, feeling her way with
fingers of radar out of the pool and down the channel behind the
breakwater and under the overhang of the city roof. Then the water
line went slowly down across the windows as she surfaced. A moment
later she was on full contragravity, and the ship which had been a
submarine was now an aircraft.
Murell, who was accustomed to the relatively drab sunsets of Terra,
simply couldn't take his eyes from the spectacle that covered the
whole western half of the sky--high clouds streaming away from the
daylight zone to the west and lighted from below by the sun. There
were more clouds coming in at a lower level from the east. By the time
the _Javelin_ returned to Port Sandor, it would be full dark and rain,
which would soon turn to snow, would be falling. Then we'd be in for
it again for another thousand hours.
Ramón Llewellyn was saying to Joe Kivelson: "We're one man short;
Devis, Abdullah's helper. Hospital."
"Get hurt in the fight, last night? He was right with us till we got
out to the elevators, and then I missed him."
"No. He made it back to the ship about the same time we did, and he
was all right then. Didn't even have a scratch. Strained his back at
work, this morning, trying to lift a power-unit cartridge by hand."
I could believe that. Those things weighed a couple of hundred pounds.
Joe Kivelson swore.
"What's he think this is, the First Century Pre-Atomic? Aren't there
any lifters on the ship?"
Llewellyn shrugged. "Probably didn't want to bother taking a couple of
steps to get one. The doctor told him to take treatment and
observation for a day or so."
"That's Al Devis?" I asked. "What hospital?" Al Devis's strained back
would be good for a two-line item; he'd feel hurt if we didn't mention
it.
"Co-op hospital."
That was all right. They always sent in their patient lists to the
_Times_. Tom was griping because he'd have to do Devis's work and his
own.
"You know anything about engines, Walt?" he asked me.
"I know they generate a magnetic current and convert rotary magnetic
current into one-directional repulsion fields, and violate the
daylights out of all the old Newtonian laws of motion and attraction,"
I said. "I read that in a book. That was as far as I got. The math got
a little complicated after that, and I started reading another book."
"You'd be a big help. Think you could hit anything with a 50-mm?" Tom
asked. "I know you're pretty sharp with a pistol or a chopper, but a
cannon's different."
"I could try. If you want to heave over an empty packing case or
something, I could waste a few rounds seeing if I could come anywhere
close to it."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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