Farmer in the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein Page A

of waiting.
    I didn't blame him; it seemed like hours went past and still nothing to eat. I thought we had been forgotten.
    Edwards had been hanging around the door, peering out. Finally he said, “This is ridiculous! We can't sit here all day. I'm for finding out what's the hold up. Who's with me?”
    One of the fellows objected, “The Captain said to sit tight.”
    “What if he did? And what can he do if we don't? We aren't part of the crew.”
    I pointed out that the Captain had authority over the whole ship, but he brushed me off. “Tommyrot! We got a right to know what's going on—and a right to be fed. Who's coming along?”
    Another boy said, “You're looking for trouble, Noisy.”
    Edwards stopped; I think he was worried by the remark but he couldn't back down. Finally he said, “Look, we're supposed to have a ship's aide and we haven't got one. You guys elect me ship's aide and I'll go bring back chow. How's that?”
    Nobody objected out loud. Noisy said, “Okay, here I go.”
    He couldn't have been gone more than a few seconds when a ship's aide showed up carrying a big box of packaged rations. He dealt them out and had one left over. Then he counted the bunks. “Weren't there twenty boys in here?” he asked.
    We looked at each other but nobody said anything. He pulled out a list and called our names. Edwards didn't answer, of course, and he left, taking Noisy's ration with him.
    Then Noisy showed up and saw us eating and wanted to know where his lunch was. We told him; he said, “For the love of Mike! Why didn't you guys save it for me? A fine bunch you turned out to be.” And he left again.
    He came back shortly, looking mad. A ship's aide followed him and strapped him down.
    We had about reached the teeth-picking stage when the screen on the ceiling lit up again and there was the Moon. It looked as if we were headed right toward it and coming up fast. I began to wonder if Captain Harkness had dropped a decimal point.
    I lay back on my couch and watched it grow. After a while it looked worse. When it had grown until it filled the screen and more and it seemed as if we couldn't possibly miss, I saw that the mountains were moving past on the screen from right to left. I breathed a sigh of relief; maybe the Old Man knew what he was doing after all.
    A voice came over the speaker: “We are now passing the Moon and tacking slightly in so doing. Our relative speed at point of closest approach is more than fifty miles per second, producing a somewhat spectacular effect.”
    I'll say it was spectacular! We zipped across the face of the Moon in about half a minute, then it faded behind us. I suppose they simply kept a TV camera trained on it, but it looked as if we had dived in, turned sharply, and raced out again. Only you don't make sharp turns at that speed.
    About two hours later they stopped gunning her. I had fallen asleep and I dreamed I was making a parachute jump and the chute failed to open. I woke up with a yell, weightless, with my stomach dropping out of me again. It took me a moment to figure out where I was.
    The loudspeaker said: “End of acceleration. Spin will be placed on the ship at once.”
    But it did not happen all at once; it happened very slowly. We drifted toward one wall and slid down it toward the outer wall of the ship. That made what had been the outer wall the floor; we stood on it— and the side with the bunks on it was now a wall and the side with the TV screen on it, which had been the ceiling, was now the opposite wall. Gradually we got heavier.
    Noisy was still strapped to his couch; the ship's aide had moved the buckles so that he could not reach them himself. Now he was up against the wall, hanging on the straps like a papoose. He began to yell for us to help him down.
    He was not in any danger and he could not have been too uncomfortable, for we weren't up to a full gravity, not by a whole lot. It turned out later that the Captain had brought the spin up to one-third g