Astounding British Edition, Volume 8, No. 11 — page 38: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

36 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION A sharp whack across the soles of his boots brought him painfully awake. “Get your feet off the controls!” snapped an angry voice. Roki winced and blinked at a narrow frowning face with a cigar clenched in its teeth. “And get out of that chair!” the face growled around its cigar. His feet stung with pain. He hissed a snarl and bounded to his feet; grabbing a handful of the intruder’s shirt-front, he aimed a punch at the cigar—then stayed the fist in midair. Something felt wrong about the shirt. Aghast, he realized there was a woman inside it. He let go and reddened. “I .. . I thought you were the pilot.” She eyed him contemptuously as she tucked in her shirt. “I am, Doc.” She tossed her hat on the navigation desk, revealing a close-cropped head of dark hair. She removed the cigar from her face, neatly pinched out the fire, and filed the butt in the pocket of her dungarees for a rainy day. She had a nice mouth, with the cigar gone, but it was tight with anger. “Stay out of my seat,” she told him crisply, “and out of my hair, Let’s get that straight before we start.” “This . . . this is your tub?” he gasped. She stalked to a panel and began punch- ing settings into the courser. “That’s right. I'm Daleth Shipping Incorporated. Any comments?” “You expect this wreck to make it fe Sol?” he growled. She snapped him a sharp, mhercayed glance. “Well listen to the free-ride! Make your complaint to the colonel, fellow. I don’t expect anything, except my pay. I’m willing to chance it. Why shouldn’t you?” “The existence of a fool is not neces- sarily a proof of the existence of two fools,” he said sourly. “If you don’t like it, go elsewhere.” She straightened and swept him with a clinical glance. “But as I understand it, you can’t be too particular.” He frowned. “Are you planning to make that your business?” “Uh-uh! You’re nothing to me, fellow. I don’t care who I haul, as-long as it’s legal. Now do you want a ride, or don’t you?” He nodded curtly and stalked back to find quarters. “Stay outa my cabin,” she bellowed after him. Roki grunted disgustedly. The pilot was typical of Daleth civilization. It was still a rough, uncouth planet with a thinly scat- tered population, a wild frontier, and grow- ing pains. The girl was the product of a wildly expanding, tough fisted culture with little respect for authority. It occurred to him immediately that she might be thinking of selling him to the Solarian officials— as the man who blasted the mercy ship. . “Prepare to lift,’ came the voice of the intercom. “Two minutes before blast-off.” Roki suppressed an urge to scramble out of the ship and call the whole thing off. The rockets belched, coughed, and then hissed faintly, idling in wait for a command. Roki stretched out on his bunk, for some of these older ships were rather rough on blast-off. The hiss became a thunder, and the Idiot moved skyward—first slowly, then with a spurt of speed. When it cleared the atmosphere, there was a sudden lurch as it shed the now-empty booster burners. There was a moment of dead silence, as the ship hovered without power. Then the faint shriek of the ion streams came to his ears— as the ion drive became useful in the vacuum of space. He glanced out the port to watch the faint streak of luminescence focus into a slender needle of high-speed particles, pushing the Jdiot ever higher in a rush of acceleration. He punched the intercom button. “Not bad, for a Dalethian,” he called admiringly. “Keep your opinions to yourself,” growled Daleth Incorporated. The penetration to higher C-levels came without subjective sensation. Roki knew it was happening when the purr from the reactor room went deep-throated and when the cabin lights went dimmer. He stared calmly out the port, for the phenomenon of penetration never ceased to thrill him. The transition to high-C began as a blue- shift in the starlight. Distant, dull-red stars came slowly brighter, whiter—until they burned like myriad welding arcs in the black vault. They were not identical with the stars of the home continuum, but rather, pro- jections of the same star-masses at higher C-levels of five-space, where the velocity of light was gradually increasing as the Idiot climbed higher in the C-component. At last he had to close the port, for the starlight was becoming unbearable as its wave-length moved into the ultra-violet and the X-ray bands. He watched on a fluores- cent. viewing screen. The projective star- masses were flaring into supernovae, and the changing continuums seemed to be collapsing toward the ship in the blue-shift EComichbooks:co