with a character nuts enough
about space to armor up and stuff himself inside a blastoff drum? Of
course he didn't come that way from home. There's that electronic check
of drum contents at the gate of the port. But he was there on a
visitor's pass, waiting--having hitchhiked all the way to here. After
the electronic check, he figured on stowing away, while the drums were
waiting to be loaded. The only thing we did to help was to take a little
of the stuff out of the spare drum and stow it in our two drums, to
leave him some room. We thought sure he'd be caught, quick. But you can
see how he got away with it. Those U.S.S.F. boys at the port don't
really give a damn who gets Out Here."

"Okay--I'll buy it," Reynolds sighed heavily. "Good luck with the stunt,
Tif."

Tiflin only gave him a poisonous glare, as the nine fragile, gleaming
rings, the drifting men and the spare drum, orbited on into the Earth's
shadow, not nearly as dark as it might have been because the Moon was
brilliant.

"We'd better rig the parabolic mirrors of the ionics to catch the first
sunshine in about forty minutes, so we can start moving out of orbit,"
Ramos said. "We'll have to think of food, sometime, too."

"Food, yet--ugh!" Art Kuzak grunted.

Frank felt the fingers of spasm taking hold of his stomach. Most
everybody was getting fall-sick, now, their insides not finding any up
or down direction. But the guys wavered back to their bubbs. The
shoulder ionics of their Archers, though normally sun-energized, could
draw power from the small nuclear batteries of the armor during the rare
moments when there could be darkness anywhere in solar space.

The Planet Strappers stood in the rigging of their fragile vehicles,
setting the full-sized ionics to produce increased acceleration which
would gradually push the craft beyond orbit. Joe Kuzak ran a steel wire
from a pivot bolt at the hub of his ring, to tow Tiflin and his drum.

Then everybody crawled into their respective bubbs, most of them needing
the centrifugal gravity to help straighten out their fall-sickness.

"My neck is swelling, too," Frank Nelsen heard Charlie Reynolds say.
"Lymphatic glands sometimes bog down in the absence of weight. Don't
worry if it happens to some of you. We know that it straightens out."

For a few minutes it seemed that they had a small respite in their
struggle for adjustment to a fantastic environment.

"Well--I got cleaned up, some--that's better," Two-a