Bordman knew there was something wrong when the throbbing, acutely uncomfortable vibration of rocket blasts shook the ship.
Now she tilted her head on one side as she looked inquiringly at Bordman."I\'m wondering, too," he told her, just as an especially sustained and violent shuddering of rocket-impulsion made his chair legs thutter on the floor....
She hadn\'t been at all a nuisance.
She was making the journey to Xosa II as a representative of the Amerind Historical Society, but she\'d brought her own bookreels and some elaborate fancywork which-woman-fashion-she used to occupy her hands.
It was extraordinary that a girl could be so self-sufficient on a tedious space-voyage, and Bordman approved of her.
She was Aletha Redfeather, an unusually lovely Amerind.
She looked surprised.
The Warlock\'s other passenger came out of her cabin.
There was something definitely wrong.
At the moment, though, the rockets blasted, and stopped, and blasted again.
Passenger service was not yet authorized to the planet ahead, and would not be until Bordman had made the report he was on his way to compile.
This trip it carried just two passengers.
It would have been immediate, on a regular liner, but the Warlock was practically a tramp.
Nobody came to explain the eccentricity of a spaceship using rockets.
He looked up from the bookscreen, waiting.
He had been reading, in the passenger lounge of the Warlock-a very small lounge indeed-but as a senior Colonial Survey officer he was well-traveled enough to know when things did not go right.
He sat still.
Rockets were strictly emergency devices, these days, so when they were used there was obviously an emergency.
Bordman knew there was something wrong when the throbbing, acutely uncomfortable vibration of rocket blasts shook the ship
