But for all the advance arrangements they had made to divide the ship's
work, it was Dal Timgar who took complete control of the _Lancet_ for
the first two weeks of its cruise. Neither Tiger nor Jack challenged his
command; not a word was raised in protest. The Earthmen were too sick to
talk, much less complain about anything.
For Dal the blast-off from the port of Seattle and the conversion into
Koenig star-drive was nothing new. His father owned a fleet of Garvian
trading ships that traveled to the far corners of the galaxy by means of
a star-drive so similar to the Koenig engines that only an electronic
engineer could tell them apart. All his life Dal had traveled on the
outgoing freighters with his father; star-drive conversion was no
surprise to him.
But for Jack and Tiger, it was their first experience in a star-drive
ship. The _Lancet_'s piloting and navigation were entirely automatic;
its destination was simply coded into the drive computers, and the ship
was ready to leap across light years of space in a matter of hours. But
the conversion to star-drive, as the _Lancet_ was wrenched, crew and
all, out of the normal space-time continuum, was far outside of normal
human experience. The physical and emotional shock of the conversion hit
Jack and Tiger like a sledge hammer, and during the long hours while the
ship was traveling through the time-less, distance-less universe of the
drive to the pre-set co-ordinates where it materialized again into
conventional space-time, the Earthmen were retching violently, too sick
to budge from the bunk room.
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