very one of the pushpots outside, flared chemical fumes
in a simultaneous, gigantic thrust. A small wire-wound jato for
jet-assisted-take-off will weigh a hundred and forty pounds and deliver
a thousand pounds of thrust for fourteen seconds. And that is for
rockets using nonpoisonous compounds. The jatos of the pushpots used the
beryllium-fluorine fuel that had lifted the Platform and that filled the
take-off rockets of Joe's ship. These jatos gave the pushpots themselves
an acceleration of ten gravities, but it had to be shared with the cage
and the ship. Still....

Joe felt himself slammed back into his seat with irresistible,
overwhelming force. The vibration from the jets had been bad. Now he
didn't notice it. He didn't notice much of anything but the horrible
sensations of six-gravity acceleration.

It was not exactly pain. It was a feeling as if a completely intolerable
and unbearable pressure pushed at him. Not only on the outside, like a
blow, but inside too, like nothing else imaginable. Not only his chest
pressed upon his lungs, but his lungs strained toward his backbone. Not
only the flesh of his thighs tugged to flatten itself against his
acceleration-chair, but the blood in his legs tried to flow into and
burst the blood-vessels in the back of his legs.

The six-gravity acceleration seemed to endure for centuries. Actually,
it lasted for fourteen seconds. In that time it increased the speed of
the little ship by rather more than half a mile per second, something
over 1,800 miles per hour. Before, the ship had possessed an orbital
speed of a shade over 1,470 miles an hour. After the jato thrust, it was
traveling nearly 3,400 miles per hour. It needed to travel something
over 12,000 miles per hour to reach the artificial satellite of Earth.

The intolerable thrust ended abruptly. Joe gasped. But he could allow
himself only a shake of the head to clear his brain. He jammed down the
take-off rocket firing button. There was a monstrous noise and a mighty
surging, and Haney panted, "Clear of cage...."

And then they were pressed fiercely against their acceleration chairs
again. The ship was no longer in its launching cage. It was no longer
upheld by pushpots. It was free, with its take-off rockets flaming. It
plunged on up and out. But the acceleration was less. Nobody can stand
six gravities for long. Anybody can take three--for a while.

Joe's body resisted movement with a weight of four hundred and fifty