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He tried to stand up, but he found himself staggering toward one crazily-slanted wall. The stagger was partly due to his grogginess, and partly due to the Coriolis forces acting within the spinning ship. The artificial gravity was gone, which meant that the interstellar drive engines had been smashed.
The centrifugal force caused by the spinning ship gave an effective pull of less than one Earth gravity, but the weird twists caused by the Coriolis forces made motion and orientation difficult. Besides, the ship was spinning slightly on her long axis as well as turning end-for-end. MacMaine stood there for a moment, trying to think. He had expected to die.
The remaining one per cent of the normal hydraulic mass of the rim had been diverted to a very small-diameter tube at the extreme inner portion of the rim, and was now being driven through this tube at frantically higher velocities to compensate for the removal of the major mass, and to maintain a small percentage of the original spin, so that the hub would not be totally in free fall, though the pseudo-gravity of centrifugal force had already fallen to a mere shadow of a shadow of itself, and some of the personnel were feeling the combined squeamishness of the Coriolis effect near the center of the ship, and the lessening of the gravity, pseudo though it had been, that they had had with them in the rim.
However, only the dosimeters could be relied on to determine whether the nausea was more from the effects of radiation; the effects of the near-free-fall and Coriolis experienced in the hub; or perhaps some of it was psychosomatic, and had no real basis other than the fear engendered by emergency conditions.
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