Second Stage Lensmen by E.E. Smith

Through the ether the mighty _Dauntless_ bored her serene way homeward, at the easy touring blast -- for her -- of some eighty parsecs an hour. The engineers inspected and checked their equipment, from instrument needles to blast nozzles; re-lining, repairing, replacing anything and everything which showed any sign of wear or strain because of what the big vessel had just gone through. Then they relaxed into their customary routine of killing time -- the games of a dozen planets and the vying with each other in the telling of outrageously untruthful stories.

The officers on watch lolled at ease in their cushioned seats, making much ado of each tiny thing as it happened, even the changes of watch. The Valerians, as usual, remained invisible in their own special quarters. There the gravity was set at twenty-seven hundred instead of at the Tellurian normal of nine hundred eighty, there the atmospheric pressure was forty pounds to the square inch, there the temperature was ninety-six degrees Fahrenheit, and there Van Buskirk and his fighters lived and moved and had their daily drills of fantastic violence and stress. They were irked less than any of the others by monotony; being, as has been intimated previously, neither mental nor intellectual giants.