The Sunspacers Trilogy Read Online Free PDF

codes?”
    “I never forget.”
    We came out of the tunnel and boarded the tube car that would take us to the pad, two miles away. I grabbed a window seat and stared outside. It was the first time for both of us, and I wondered why Morey wasn’t as excited as I was; maybe Aristotle was right—knowledge killed the sense of wonder in the knower.
    The car slid forward and shot into the darkness. I turned away from the window and looked around the brightly lit inside, wondering if I would get to know any of the faces at school. Most of the girls were alone, as were the boys. Only one girl was with an older woman, but she could have been a sister. One boy seemed to be with both parents, and he was looking uneasy.
    The car glided out into a brightly lit area and slowed to a stop. Somewhere above us was the gravitic shuttle, waiting to carry us through the sky.
    “How’s the stomach?” I asked Morey.
    “All better,” he said as we stood up.
    Emerging out onto a platform, we took our places on the line in front of the elevator.
    “Attention please!”
    A young man appeared at our right, hands on hips. He seemed to me to be looking at us critically.
    “I’m your guide. My name is Kik ten Eyck,” he announced loudly. “I’ll be with you until we reach the college.” I thought he sounded as if he were herding a bunch of sheep. “I’ll be around to answer your questions and help you with any problems.” It was just a job to him, it seemed. Deliver the Earthies, dump them in the dorm, and get paid. His casual manner was probably fine for very nervous types. The flight was no big thing for him, and that would calm some people, but he seemed arrogant to me.
    When our turn came, Morey and I stepped into the lift with half a dozen other kids and were whisked up the ship’s center to our seats.
    Seats 22 and 23 were a third of the way to the nose. I grabbed the window seat again, but it didn’t matter; as in the air shuttle, there was no port, only a small screen on the overhead partition. It made for a safer ship, allowing for extra shielding from radiation and meteors.
    “It’s bigger than I thought,” Morey said, peering up the shaft.
    The empty lift went down past us. “Please fasten your seat belts.” In the confined space the voice sounded as if it were talking in my ear. I sat back and looked up at the screen.
    It lit up, showing a crisscross of black roads, with weeds in between. “The launch plate,” the woman’s voice continued, “is a finely tuned installation that must be protected from heat and dust.” The weeds moved as the cover was pulled back, and the launcher emerged from below ground, a metal tube with a silvery ship standing halfway out of it, ready to pierce the sky.
    I heard a high whining sound. My arms began to feel heavier. It seemed strange to be watching the ship I was in.
    “Gravity inside the ship,” the woman’s voice went on, “will increase to six times normal before the shuttle is released by the reversing field.”
    The high-pitched sound grew louder. Vast amounts of power were flowing in to create the repelling g-force. Our seats adjusted to face the overhead screen. I felt myself being pressed back into the heavy cushioning.
    “I feel like an elephant,” Morey said.
    The blue sky on the screen shimmered from the singing sound. A strange, hurrying happiness filled me.
    I was the ship as it went up. A burst of yellow-orange sunlight struck my eyes; weightless, I fell toward a blue ocean of sky.…
    It was strange to see a spacecraft lifting without a laser or jets, rising but also dropping away from Earth, since a reversed gravitational field was involved. An invisible cone of negative gravity was pushing the vessel up to the speed needed to reach the Moon’s orbit.
    The ship climbed through the sky, fleeing the piercing cry of the launcher, becoming a small needle on the screen, held in a gravitational vise between heaven and earth.
    I fell back into myself as the picture