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."

Burl nodded. "But that means that in relation to Earth we are ourselves upside down right now!"

"Of course," said Clyde. "But in space, everything is strictly relative. We are no longer on Earth. We are a separate body in space, falling through space toward the Sun."

"Why the Sun?" asked Burl. "I thought our first objective was to be the planet Venus?"

"It was too hard to get a fix on Venus from so near the Earth. Instead, we latched on to the Sun to pull us inward. When we are near to Venus' orbit, we'll reverse and pull in on Venus," was the astronomer's answer.

"Isn't that rather risky?" asked Burl, remembering some of the quick briefings he had been given. "That's a departure from your plans."

Lockhart looked up quickly. "Yes, you're right," he admitted. "But on a trip like this we've got to learn to improvise and do it fast. We made that decision at take-off."

For an instant Burl felt a chill. He realized then what all the other men on the ship 

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