Rolling.

Kinsman felt the acceleration pressing him back slightly in his seat. But it was gentle, gentle, nothing like a rocket boost. Hardly any vibration at ail.

Two hundred.

Rotate.

The nose came up. Kinsman's hands clutched on his lap, thumb pressing an imaginary controller, and the giant rocket- plane lifted off the ground.

He turned to the woman beside him. "We're up."

She was staring at the TV screen in front of her, still looking scared. Kinsman glanced at his own screen. It showed a view from the camera in the nose of the orbiter as it rode piggyback on the lifter. He could see the bulbous nose and cockpit of the lifter below them, and scudding clouds that they had already climbed past.

"When did they turn the screens on?" he wondered.

"Just as we started down the runway. Didn't you no- tice?"

"No."

Within fifteen minutes they were high over the Atlantic, a cloud-flecked sheet of hammered gray metal far below them.

The intercom speakers hummed to life. "This is Captain 221

Burke speaking. I'm the Command Pilot of your orbiter aerospace craft. Our big brother down underneath us will be releasing us in approximately five minutes. They'll fly back to the Cape while we light our rocket engines and head onward into orbit and rendezvous with Space Station Alpha. You will hear some noise and feel a few bumps when we separate. Don't be alarmed."

The separation, when it came, was barely discernible. Kinsman felt a slight sinking sensation as the TV screen showed the lifter swing away and out of sight. Then a dull throbbing pulsed through the cabin, felt in the bones more than heard. The cabin vibrated slightly as the orbiter nosed up.

"Look!" Jinny Woods exclaimed. "I can see the curve of the Earth!"

I know. I've been there. But Kinsman felt the thrill of it all over again. Swiftly their weight diminished until they were in zero gravity, hanging loosely against their restraining harnesses.

Jinny swallowed hard several times but managed to keep herself together. Kinsman watched her closely.

"It feels like falling, at first," he said. "But once you get used to it, it's more like floating. Just don't make any sudden head motions."

She smiled weakly at him.

He relaxed and luxuriated in the freedom of zero gee. How many times has it been? Lost count. Someplace back there I stopped counting. He wondered what would happen if he unbuckled and got up from his seat and glided freely along the aisle separating the double rows of seats. Probably the PR guides would get hysterical. He pictured himself drifting up to the cockpit, going inside to join the crew and their smoothly functioning equipment. He laughed to himself at the thought of commandeering the spacecraft, bypassing the space station and heading on to the Moon. The first space hijack, he mused. Oh, for ten toes!

Soon enough the flight ended as the orbiter lined up with the loading dock at the center of Alpha's set of concentric rings. This was a piece of piloting that Kinsman had never done, and he watched the TV screen, fascinated, as the ship approached the space station like a dart seeking the bull's- 222 eye. Alpha looked like a set of different-sized bicycle wheels nested within one another. Kinsman knew that the biggest one, the outermost wheel, was turning at a rate that would induce a full Earth gravity for the people who lived and worked inside it. The smaller wheels—most of them still under construction—had lighter gravity pulls. The loading dock at the center of the assembly was at zero gee, effectively.

The rendezvous and docking maneuvers were flawless, and soon Kinsman and the other passengers were shuffling, stiil weightless, along the narrow ladder that led through the orbiter's hatch into the station loading bay.

The loading bay was even more tightly organized than the groundside takeoff had been. There was a NASA or corporate representative for each of the fifty visitors to personally guide each of the individual visitors to the stairs that led "down" to the main living quarters in the outermost wheel.

Kinsman was relieved to be separated from Jinny Woods, although his guide—a sparkling bright young industrial engineer—treated him like a fragile grandfather.

"Just this way, sir. Now you don't actually need the stairs up here in the low-gravity area, but I'd recommend that you use them anyway."