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"You mean by re-routing the ship to Odessa planet, or planet 'O' as you call it?" I replied with a grin.
"That may be quite a challenge," added Natalia. "If you knew our captain, you wouldn't even think it. He thinks this Gamma .8 place is heaven."
"Some heaven!" Martin replied.
Natalia was right. There was no way in sight to stop the landing. Before the day was out, the command was given to prepare the ship for deceleration. The clock was set to minus four hundred hours.
Martin's comment was that the landing was sheer madness. He left immediately once the transition time was announced. His last words were that Bohr isn't going to sit idly by while the greatest opportunity for mankind goes out the window over the stubbornness of one single man.
The long sequence of preparations began anew that was now required before retropower could be initiated with artificial gravity being applied from a different direction again. Furnishings had to be re-arranged and fastened to accommodate the impending shift in artificial gravity. The pool had to be emptied into tanks; plants stored away, lounges tied down. The sewer station suffered the greatest upset. Every plant had to uprooted and packaged for re-use at an alternate site. Even the ship's engines had to undergo a major modification. All forty-eight units, arranged in twelve clusters, had to be relocated to the top of a six-hundred-foot tower and be tilted the opposite way, towards the ship, minus a twenty-degree outward projection so that their energy streams would be focused away from the hull. At first, the six-hundred-foot tower had to be erected. A base for it extended through the center of the engine platform. A million bolts, so it seemed, were required to hold the tower in place. I suddenly realized that the tower would have to withstand several times the weight of the ship!
The engine platform was a world of grotesque metal sculpture interconnected by arrays of pipes, flexible hoses, and cables. I was part of the work team. Assembling the tower was like putting together a Mechano-set of gigantic proportions. Also, we were doing this work in the dark and lonely world of space. Only now, being in space was different. Traveling with Martin, I recalled being surrounded by a sea of stars. There were no stars overhead of the platform, and those on the horizon appeared yellow, turning darker and towards the red the higher they stood over us.
No one was startled, except me. Everyone else expected the phenomenon. We were racing away from any light source that lay behind the ship so that an incoming wave appeared to be stretched in time to a point where the eye could no longer recognize it as light. What had startled me about this phenomena, was that it didn't agree with my previous experience in space. Not the slightest trace of any red or blue shift was apparent when Martin had taken me to see the black hole. Maybe the difference came from being still tied to the sphere of reality that pertains to the ship, being tied to its atmosphere that extended from it into the space suit I was wearing. Being in space felt different now. I felt encumbered by the unwieldy suit. Martin would laugh if he saw me like that, I was sure of it.
Once the tower was built, the entire engine platform was disassembled. The pieces were raised to the top of the tower where they were reassembled with all the engines gimbaled below the tower platform, facing towards the ship but tilted away from it to deflect the retrofire. A million connections had to be severed and be re-established. Each engine module contained four separate functional engines, each to be used at different speeds relative to the background of space. While working on the platform, we were warned not to peer over the edge of it. The shielding effect of the nose cone extended no more than a foot beyond the periphery of the ship. Anyone who would extend his hand or head beyond this zone of protection would come into contact with the energy background of space that would tear apart the atomic structures of his body moving at near light speed velocity. That's why the ship couldn't be turned around to have it engines face forward in the manner that slow-moving space ships decelerate.
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