mbals.

Lockhart rang a second gong, then turned a new control. The pitch of the
generators, faintly audible to them, changed, took on a new keening. The
ship seemed suddenly to jump as if something had grasped it. The feeling
of weightlessness vanished momentarily, then there was a moment of
dizziness and a sudden sensation of being upside down.

For a shocking instant, Burl felt himself hanging head downward from a
floor which had surprisingly turned into a ceiling. He opened his mouth
to shout, for he thought he was about to plunge onto the hard metal of
the ceiling which now hung below him so precipitously.

Then there was a whirling sensation, a sideways twisting that swung him
about against the straps. As it came, the room seemed to shift. The
curved base of the control room, which had been so suddenly a floor,
became in a moment a wall, lopsided and eerie. Then it shifted again,
and, startlingly, Burl sagged back into his cushioned seat as the
hemispherical room again resumed its normal aspect.

Lockhart bent over the controls, cautiously moving a lever bit by bit.
Clyde was bent over his viewer, calling out slight corrections.

Now, at last, Burl felt the pressure he had expected. His weight grew
steadily greater, back to normal, then increased. He found himself
concentrating on his breathing, forcing his lungs up against the
increasing weight of his ribs.

"Hold up," his buzzing eardrums heard someone say--possibly Oberfield.
"We don't need to accelerate more than one g. Take it easy."

The weight lessened instantly. Then the pressure was off. Everything
seemed normal. Lockhart sat back and began to unloosen his straps. The
others followed suit.

In one viewer, Burl glimpsed the black of outer space, and in another,
the wide grayish-green bowl of the Earth spreading out below. In a third
he saw the blazing disc of the Sun.

"Did everything go all right?" he asked quietly of Clyde.

The redhead looked up at him and smiled. "Better than we might have
expected for a first flight," he said.

"We're latching on to the Sun's grip now. We're falling toward the Sun;
not just falling, but pulling ourselves faster toward it, so that we can
keep up a normal gravity pressure. We're soon going to be going faster
than any rocket has ever gone. The living-space sphere rotated itself as
soon as we started that. That's what made everything seem upside down
that time and why everything has come back to normal."

Bu