Explore "Hostage of Tomorrow" by Robert Abernathy on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The captain of the _Siegfried_ squinted at the tables the navigator had handed him, mentally translating their figures into acceleration units. The ship was only an hour from the assigned point in space, and it was necessary to make a final, ultimately correct alignment, in which seconds of arc meant miles of displacement in the dispersion of the dust on Earth's surface.
The captain's concentration was disturbed by the nagging conviction that something was amiss -- or had been amiss a minute or so earlier -- about his familiar control room. For a moment he had fancied that the door to the sternward-descending stairshaft was standing open; but it was obviously closed.