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He looked down first at the pitted, jagged face of the Moon, with an expression in which rapture and terror may have been mingled, glanced with the hope of desperation toward the job scout, and then distractedly continued dismantling the rigging of his vehicle, as if to repack it in the blastoff drum for a landing. "Hey hold on, Les!" Two-and-Two shouted.
But in the final few pages were computations a trial orbit to Venus, several columns of blastoff figures, statistics on geographical distribution of the Venusian landmasses. Cavour had certainly been a peculiar bird, Alan thought. Probably half the "persecutions" he complained of had existed solely inside his own fevered brain. But that hardly mattered.
The doors of the passenger compartments had opened; likewise the blastoff drums had been ejected automatically, and were orbiting free. Maybe it was Gimp who moved ahead of him. Looking out, Frank saw what was certainly Ramos, already straddling a drum marked with a huge red M.R., riding it like a jaunty troll on a seahorse.
At first they were impersonal and expected parts of the scene, until the numbers, ceramic-enamelled on their striped flanks, were noticed: GO-11 and GO-12. "They're us up the old roller coaster!" Charlie Reynolds shouted. Then everybody was checking his blastoff ticket, as if he didn't remember the number primly typed on it. Frank Nelsen had GO-12. GO Ground-to-Orbit.
Ramos, scarred, somewhat, along the neck and left cheek, and a bit stiff of shoulder, was rueful but very eager. Frank's gutted gear was out of the blastoff drum, and spread around the shop. Most of it was already fixed. Ramos had been helping. "Well, Frankie here's one loose goose who is really glad to be leaving Luna," he said. "Are the asteroids all right with you for a start?"
Frank Nelsen longed to paste somebody, even in the absence of absolute impoliteness. The blastoff drums were already being lifted off the trucks, weighed, screened electronically, and moved toward a loading elevator on a conveyor. The whole process was automatic. "Nine men ten drums how come?" one of the U.S.S.F. people inquired. "A spare. Its GO carriage charge is paid," Reynolds answered.
'Cause he sure can't stand another devil-killer." "We'd better," Frank answered quickly. But now Tiflin, having deserted his blastoff drum, was coming through the airlock flaps, too. He stepped forward gingerly, along the spinning, ring-shaped tunnel. "Poor bookworm," he growled in a tone curiously soft for Glen Tiflin. "Think I don't understand how it is?
There was one place no one would think to look for him, if he could manage to keep out of range of the viewscreen lenses ... the outer hull of the ship. If he could clamp himself to the hull, somehow, and manage to cling there during blastoff, he could follow Greg and Johnny right home. He checked the fuse on the airlock once again to make certain it would work.
Alan remembered his father's hard, grim expression as he had been told the story. Captain Donnell's reaction had been curt, immediate, and thoroughly typical: he had nodded, closed the roll book, and turned to Art Kandin, the Valhalla's First Officer and the Captain's second-in-command. "Remove Crewman Donnell from the roster," he had snapped. "All other hands are on board. Prepare for blastoff."
Frank Nelsen joshed. "Like other Bunches, I guess," Paul Hendricks laughed. "A couple of moving vans should do the trick..." On June first, ten days before blastoff, David Lester came back to the shop, sheepishness, pleasure and worry showing in his face. "I cleared up matters at home, guys," he said. "And I went to Minneapolis and obtained one of these."
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