ship n. 1

Let the Martians come…. If necessary we can quit the earth as the Athenians fled from Athens before the advancing hosts of Xerxes, and like them, take refuge upon our ships—these new ships of space, with which American inventiveness has furnished us.

Far up among the clouds the gleaming hulls of the huge interstellar ships could be seen returning from their voyages to the planets and more distant stars, and further down were the outward-bound vessels slowly floating into the air from the wharves below.

The Martians crowded around that ship after the initial shock and roar of its landing was past.

Dick and I share alike in all the chores aboard our ‘ship’. We have arranged to take turns at arranging meals, each vying to make his or her meal the most appetizing, and at the same time conserving the fresh foods. Of dish-washing we make a great ado, jealously attempting to prove our individual superiority in the feat. We are both reading the heavy books with which Professor Rollins so thoroughly stocked the cupboards—books that teach us even more about what we are to expect on Mars.

When the objective approaches, momentum is resumed, and the ship appears in normal space with only a couple of thousand miles to go.

Eight large ships came individually out of the darkness between the stars that was their sea, and began to move about Noorhut in a carefully timed pattern of orbits.

The ship itself was managed by turtle-men, who aged very slowly, so that while Suzdal coursed the outer rim of the galaxy and let the thousands of years—local count—go past while he slept in his frozen bed, the turtle-men rose generation by generation, trained their young to work the ship, [etc.].

We came down out of the ship after we had landed and stood upon the surface…. The horizon was too near, much nearer than on the moon. We felt at once that we stood on a small world.

Fueling such a ship in orbit instead of on the earth is necessary because we don’t have enough rockets powerful enough to lift both the ship and its fuel out of the earth’s gravity.

Ships could slip into the Way, cross interstellar space at massive tau factors, and then decelerate instantaneously at the other end simply by leaving the stream.

An asteroid had grazed Matilda. The impact didn’t break the hull, but it did dent the control area of the ship, metal pressing into the pipes that cycled the siluminium.