water tap was now moulded upward, beads glistening on its handle. The wispy thing caught her attention again and she looked up.

Two people, tightly wrapped and bound in hammocks, were staring down at her, amazed, swinging on their stomachs. Craning further, she saw Rat. He was hanging upside down in the chair, grinning at her in reverse.

"Flip-flop," he laconically explained.

"For cripes sakes, Jehosaphat!" Gladney groaned. "Turn me over on my back! Do something!" Gray stood on tiptoes and just could pivot the hammocks on their rope-axis.

"And now, please, just how do I get into mine?" she bit at Rat.

Existence dragged. Paradoxically, time dropped away like a cloak as the sense of individual hours and minutes vanished, and into its place crept a slow-torturing substitute. As the ship revolved, monotonously, first the ceiling and then the floor took on dullish, maddening aspects, eyes ached continuously from staring at them time and again without surcease. The steady, drumming rockets crashed into the mind and the walls shrieked malevolently on the eyeballs. Dull, throbbing sameness of the poorly filtered air, a growing taint in the nostrils. Damp warm skin, reeking blankets. The taste of fuel in the mouth for refreshment. Slowly mounting mental duress. And above all the drumming of the rockets.

Once, a sudden, frightening change of pitch in the rockets and a wild, sickening lurch. Meteor rain. Maddening, plunging swings to the far right and left, made without warning. A torn lip as a sudden lurch tears the faucet from her mouth. A shattered tooth.

"Sorry!" Rat whispered.

"Shut up and drive!" she cried.

"Patti ..." Judith called out, in pain.

Peace of mind followed peace of body into a forgotten limbo of lost things, a slyly climbing madness directed at one another. Waspish words uttered in pain, fatigue and temper. Fractiousness. A hot, confined, stale hell. Sleep became a hollow mockery, as bad water and concentrated tablets brought on stomach pains to plague them. Consciousness punctured only by spasms of lethargy, shared to some extent by the invalids. Above all, crawling lassitude and incalescent tempers.

Rat watched the white, drawn face swing in the hammock beside him. And his hands never faltered on the controls.

Never a 

 Prev. P 11/16 next