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The four of them watched through the ports as the thread of vapor spedupward. They hated the rocket and the people who had built it. Joe saidbetween his teeth, "We could spend our landing-rockets and make itchase us, but it'll have fuel for that!"
The Chief muttered in Mohawk. The words sounded as if they ought to haveblue fire at their edges and smell of sulphur. Mike the midget saidcrackling things in his small voice. Haney stared, his eyes burning.
Their ship was a little over 400 miles up, now. The rocket was 100 orbetter. The rendezvous would be probably 200 miles ahead andcorrespondingly higher. The rocket was accelerating furiously. It hadfarther to travel, but its rate of climb was already enormous and itincreased every second.
The ship could swing to right or left on steering rockets, but the warrocket could swerve also. It was controlled from the ground. It did notneed to crash the small ship from space. Within a limited number ofmiles the blast of its atomic warhead would vaporize any substance thatcould exist. And of course the ship could not turn back. Even theexpenditure of all its landing-rockets could not bring twenty tons ofship to a halt. They could speed it up, so it would pass the calculatedmeeting place ahead of the war rocket. But the bomb would simply followin a stern chase. In any case, the ship could not stop.
But neither could the rocket.
Joe never knew how he saw the significance of that fact. On land or sea,of course, an automobile or a ship moves in the direction in which it ispointed. Even an airplane needs to make only minor corrections for aircurrents which affect it. But an object in space moves on a course whichis the sum of all its previous speeds and courses. Joe's ship was movingeastward above the Earth at so many miles per second. If he drovenorth--at a right angle to his present course--the ship would not ceaseto move to the east. It would simply move northward in addition tomoving east. If the rocket from Earth turned north or east it wouldcontinue to move up and merely add the other motion to its verticalrise.
Joe stared at the uncoiling thread of vapor which was the murderrocket's trail. He hated it so fiercely that he wanted to escape iteven at the cost of destruction, merely to foil its makers. At onemoment, he was hardly aware of anything but his own fury and the franticdesire to frustrate the rocket at any cost. The next instant, somehow,he was not angry at all. Because somehow his brain had dredged up thefact that the war rocket could no more turn back than he could--and hesaw its meaning.
"Mike!" he snapped sharply. "Get set! Report what we do! Everybody setfor acceleration! Steering rockets ready, Chief! Get set to help, Haney!I don't know whether we'll get out of this alive, but we'd better getinto our space suits."
Then he literally dived back to his acceleration chair and strapped inin feverish haste. The ship was then a quarter of the way to the meetingplace and the rocket had very much farther to go. But it was risingfaster.
The ship's gyros whined and squealed as Joe jammed on their controls.The little ship spun in emptiness. Its bow turned and pointed down. Thesteering rockets made their roarings.
Joe found himself panting. "The--rocket's rising faster--than we are.It's been gaining--altitude maybe--two minutes. It's lighter thanwhen--it started but--it can't stop--less than a minute, anyhow so weduck under it----"
He did not make computations. There was no time. The war rocket mighthave started at four or five gravities acceleration, but it would speedup as its fuel burned. It might be accelerating at fifteen gravitiesnow, and have an attained velocity of four miles a second and stillincreasing. If the little ship ducked under it, it could not kill thatrate-of-climb in time to follow in a stern chase.
"Haney!" panted Joe. "Watch out the port! Are we going to make it?"
Haney crawled forward. Joe had forgotten the radar because he'd seen therocket with his own eyes. It seemed to need eyes to watch it. Mike spokecurtly into the microphone broadcasting to ground. He was reporting eachaction and order as it took place and was given. There was no time toexplain anything. But Mike thought of the radar. He watched it.
It showed the vast curve of Earth's surface, 400 miles down. It showed amoving pip, much too much nearer, which was the war rocket. Mike made adot on the screen with a grease pencil where the pip showed. It moved.He made another dot. The pip continued to move. He made other dots.
They formed a curving line--curved because the rocket wasaccelerating--which moved inexorably toward the center of the radarscreen. The curve would cut the screen's exact center. That meantcollision.
"Too close, Joe!" said Mike shrilly. "We may miss it, but not enough!"
"Then hold fast," yelled Joe. "Landing rockets firing, three--two--one!"
The bellowing of the landing-rockets smote their ears. Weight seizedupon them, three gravities of acceleration toward the rushing flood ofclouds and solidity which was the Earth. The ship plunged downward withall its power. It was intolerable--and ten times worse because they hadbeen weightless so long and were still shaken and sore and bruised fromthe air-graze only minutes back.
Mike took acceleration better than the others, but his voice was thinwhen he gasped, "Looks--like this does it, Joe!" Seconds later he gaspedagain, "Right! The rocket's above us and still going away!"
The gyros squealed again. The ship plunged into vapor which was thetrail of the enemy rocket. For an instant the flowing confusion whichwas Earth was blotted out. Then it was visible again. The ship wasplunging downward, but its sidewise speed was undiminished and muchgreater than its rate of fall.
"Mike," panted Joe. "Get the news out. What we did--and why. I'm--goingto turn the ship's head back on our--course. We can't slow enoughbut--I'd rather crash on Earth than let them blast us----"
The ship turned again. It pointed back in the direction from which ithad come. With the brutal sternward pressure produced by thelanding-rockets, it felt as if it were speeding madly back where it hadcome from. It was the sensation they'd felt when the ship took off fromEarth, so long before. But then the cloud masses and the earth beneathhad flowed toward the ship and under it. Now they flowed away. Theappearance was that of an unthinkably swift wake left behind by a shipat sea. The Earth's surface fled away and fled away from them.
"Crazy, this!" Joe muttered thickly. "If the ship were lighter--or wehad more power--we could land! I'm sorry, but I'd rather----"
Haney turned his head from where he clung near the bow-ports. Hisfeatures changed slowly as he talked because of acceleration-drivenblood engorging his lips and bloating his cheeks. After one instant heclosed his eyes fiercely. They felt as if they would pop out of hishead. He gasped, "Yes! Get down to air-resistance. A chance--not goodbut a chance--ejection seats--with space suits--might make it...."
He began to let himself back toward his acceleration chair. He could notpossibly have climbed forward. It was a horrible task to let himselfdown, with triple his normal weight pulling at him and after the beatingtaken a little while ago.
Sweat stood out on his skin as he lowered himself sternward. Once hisgrip on a hand-line slipped and he had to sustain the drag of nearly sixhundred pounds by a single hand and arm. It would not be a good idea tofall at three gravities.
The landing rockets roared and roared, and Joe tilted the bow down alittle farther, so that the streaming flood of clouds drew nearer.
Haney got to his acceleration chair. He let himself into it and his eyesclosed.
Mike's sharp voice barked: "What's the chance, Haney?"
Haney's mouth opened, and closed, and opened again. "Rocket flames," hegasped, "pushed back--wind--splash on hull--may melt--lightenweight--hundred to one against----"
The odds were worse than that. The ship couldn't land because itsmomentum was too great for the landing rockets to cancel out. If it hadweighed five tons instead of twenty, landing might have been possible.Haney was saying that if the ship were to be lowered into air whilerushing irresistibly sternward despite its rockets, that the rocketflames might be splashed out by the wind. Instead of streaking astern ina lance-like shape,
they might be pushed out like a rocket blast when ithits the earth in a guided missile take-off. Such a blast spreads outflat in all directions. Here the rocket flames might be spread by winduntil they played upon the hull of the ship. If they did, they mightmelt it as they melted their own steel cases in firing. Andthree-fourths or more of the hull might be torn loose from the cabin bowsection. So much was unlikely, but it was possible.
The impossible odds were that the four could survive even if the cabinwere detached. They were decelerating at three gravities now. If part ofthe ship burned or melted or was torn away, the rocket thrust mightspeed the cabin up to almost any figure. And there is a limit to thenumber of gravities a man can take, even in an acceleration chair.
Nevertheless, that was what Haney proposed. They were due to be killedanyhow. Joe tried it.
He dived into atmosphere. At 60 miles altitude a thin wailing seemed todevelop without reason. At 40 miles, the ship had lost more than twomiles per second of its speed since the landing-rockets were ignited,and there was a shuddering in all its fabric--though because of the lossof speed it was not as bad as the atmosphere-graze. At 30 it began toshake and tremble. At 25 miles high there was as horrible a vibrationand as deadly a deceleration as at the air-graze. At 12 miles above thesurface of the Earth the hull temperature indicators showed the hindpart of the hull at red heat. The ship happened to be traveling backwardat several times the speed of sound, and air could not move away frombefore it. It was compressed to white heat at the entering surface, andthe metal plating went to bright red heat at that point. But the hulljust aft of the rocket mouths was hotter still. There the splashingrocket flames bathed it in intolerable incandescence. Hull plates,braces and beams glared white----
The tip of the tail caved in. The ship's empty cargo space wasinstantly filled with air at intolerable pressure and heat.
The hull exploded outward where the rocket flames played. There was amonstrous, incredible jerking of the cabin that remained. That fractionof the ship received the full force of the rocket thrust. They coulddecelerate it at a rate of fifteen gravities or more.
They did.
Joe lost consciousness as instantly and as peacefully as if he had beenhit on the jaw.
An unknown but brief time later, he found himself listening with apeculiar astonishment. The rockets had burned out. They had lasted onlyseconds after the separation of the ship into two fragments. Radars onthe ground are authority for this. Those few seconds were extremelyimportant. The cabin lost an additional half-mile per second ofvelocity, which was enough to make the difference between the cabinheating up too, and the cabin being not quite destroyed.
The cabin remnant was heavy, of course, but it was an irregular object,some twenty feet across. It was below orbital velocity, andwind-resistance slowed it. Even so, it traveled 47 miles to the east infalling the last 10 miles to Earth. It hit a hillside and dug itself a70-foot crater in the ground.
But there was nobody in it, then. A little over a month before, it hadseemed to Joe that ejection seats were the most useless of all possiblepieces of equipment to have in a space ship. He'd been as much mistakenas anybody could be. With an ejection seat, a jet pilot can be shot outof a plane traveling over Mach one, and live to tell about it. Thiscrumpling cabin fell fast, but Joe stuffed Mike in an ejection seat andshot him out. He and the Chief dragged Haney to a seat, and then theChief shoved Joe off--and the four of them, one by one, were flung outinto a screaming stream of air. But the ribbon-parachutes did not burst.They nearly broke the necks of their passengers, but they let them downalmost gently.
And it was quite preposterous, but all four landed intact. Mike, beinglightest and first to be ejected, came down by himself in a fury becausehe'd been treated with special favor. The Chief and Joe landed almosttogether. After a long time, Joe staggered out of his space suit andharness and tried to help the Chief, and they held each other up as theystumbled off together in search of Haney.
When they found him he was sleeping heavily, exhausted, in a canebrake.He hadn't even bothered to disengage his parachute harness or take offhis suit.
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