Outward Bound, page 20
"Hey, Linc, anyone there?" Johnny's voice brought him back. "You look like you're halfway to Jupiter already." Linc grinned tiredly.
"Oh, no, he's right here," Julie said, clutching his arm.
"One minute. Deployment good. Sequence to auto."
"All crew to station."
Linc felt his pulse rate rising and strange tingles racing down his spine as the same words he had heard before replayed themselves:
"Plasma primaries are at heat, and go."
"Injection fields are go."
"Attitude and profile check positive function."
A cut to Grayling's Bridge again, Kelsoe and the CEO.
"We have go at zero minus thirty-eight seconds. Drive initialization syncing now."
Movement and the pretenses of normality all around had ceased. Everyone stared at the screen showing the view of the ship from one of the service craft. Linc felt Julie's fingers tightening around his arm.
00:05 . . .00:04 . . .00:03 . . . 00:02 . . . 00:01 . . . .
On the screen a torch of light leaped out from the Armstrong and seared across space.
"Injection . . . . Plasma ignition . . . . Acceleration registering . . . We have liftout!"
They watched the ship beginning to move against the stars and at the same time felt it as a mild urging transmitted through the floor and the seats. The image on the screen gained speed and foreshortened, but the sensation inside was unchanged. Only when the view switched to a rear view from the Armstrong showing Grayling Station and its satellites already as points vanishing into the distance was there a real indication of how fast they were already moving.
"Sisyphus is coming overhead . . . . Lineup is good . . . . Connecting now." The view changed to the grab line from the ship extending upward, and another line from off the screen in the final stages of close. "Tension . . . . We are under boost."
The sensation of weight increased noticeably but not violently. Nevertheless, Linc knew that their acceleration was almost doubled, slinging the ship into a course that would take it on its way out from Earth and across the solar system.
The Moon slid in toward the center of the screen, already smaller than seen from Grayling. Then, as the Armstrong swung outward and upward under the combined impulse of its engines and the momentum being returned through the tether, Earth began showing on one side of it. Linc remembered how he had looked down across California's great Central Valley from a peak in the Sierra and pictured the invisible people scurrying below, lost in their tiny worlds of imaginary worries and self-inflicted problems, unaware of the different reality that was within their grasp and so close, if they would only lift their heads to see it. Now he thought it about the whole world.
And yet, somewhere down there beneath those clouds another group, even now as he watched, would be going through Coulie, who would follow. And one day in the city, somebody would seek out Joe, and there would be other Joes from other cities, and they would follow too. Linc wondered how many others had watched such a view of Earth from an outgoing ship and thought similar things, long before Linc had even known Coulie existed. Before much longer now, he would meet them.
"At the high point and on target. Letting go the line. We are now on course for Jupiter. Launch crew can stand down."
The ship had become a free creature, soaring outward toward the distant point of light that would grow and take on color and form as the days passed by. Shouts of jubilation, laughs, smiles, back slappings and a few tears broke out around the deck as all the pent-up tensions dissipated. Linc and Julie found each other's hands and clutched tightly. They would doubtless return to Earth in the years to come and probably find themselves leaving it again, maybe many times. But never again could it quite be like this. They both tried to find words to say what they felt just at that moment, but there were none. Everyone else seemed to be having the same problem.
On the screen a last view being transmitted from somewhere near the Moon showed the ship as a haze of white, already diminishing among the stars.
THE END
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Outward Bound
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
James P. Hogan, Outward Bound
