<h2><SPAN name="c5" id="c5"></SPAN><i>5</i></h2>
<p>The four of them watched through the ports
as the thread of vapor sped upward. They hated the rocket
and the people who had built it. Joe said between his teeth,<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_69" id="Page_69"></SPAN></span>
"We could spend our landing-rockets and make it chase us,
but it'll have fuel for that!"</p>
<p>The Chief muttered in Mohawk. The words sounded as if
they ought to have blue fire at their edges and smell of
sulphur. Mike the midget said crackling things in his small
voice. Haney stared, his eyes burning.</p>
<p>Their ship was a little over 400 miles up, now. The rocket
was 100 or better. The rendezvous would be probably 200
miles ahead and correspondingly higher. The rocket was accelerating
furiously. It had farther to travel, but its rate
of climb was already enormous and it increased every
second.</p>
<p>The ship could swing to right or left on steering rockets,
but the war rocket could swerve also. It was controlled from
the ground. It did not need to crash the small ship from
space. Within a limited number of miles the blast of its
atomic warhead would vaporize any substance that could
exist. And of course the ship could not turn back. Even the
expenditure of all its landing-rockets could not bring twenty
tons of ship to a halt. They could speed it up, so it would
pass the calculated meeting place ahead of the war rocket.
But the bomb would simply follow in a stern chase. In any
case, the ship could not stop.</p>
<p>But neither could the rocket.</p>
<p>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 is pointed. Even an airplane needs
to make only minor corrections for air currents which affect
it. But an object in space moves on a course which is the
sum of all its previous speeds and courses. Joe's ship was
moving eastward above the Earth at so many miles per
second. If he drove north—at a right angle to his present
course—the ship would not cease to move to the east. It would
simply move northward in addition to moving east. If the
rocket from Earth turned north or east it would continue to
move up and merely add the other motion to its vertical rise.</p>
<p>Joe stared at the uncoiling thread of vapor which was the
murder rocket's trail. He hated it so fiercely that he wanted<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_70" id="Page_70"></SPAN></span>
to escape it even at the cost of destruction, merely to foil its
makers. At one moment, he was hardly aware of anything
but his own fury and the frantic desire to frustrate the rocket
at any cost. The next instant, somehow, he was not angry at
all. Because somehow his brain had dredged up the fact
that the war rocket could no more turn back than he could—and
he saw its meaning.</p>
<p>"Mike!" he snapped sharply. "Get set! Report what we do!
Everybody set for 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 get into our space suits."</p>
<p>Then he literally dived back to his acceleration chair and
strapped in in feverish haste. The ship was then a quarter
of the way to the meeting place and the rocket had very much
farther to go. But it was rising faster.</p>
<p>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. The steering rockets made their
roarings.</p>
<p>Joe found himself panting. "The—rocket's rising faster—than
we are. It's been gaining—altitude maybe—two minutes.
It's lighter than when—it started but—it can't stop—less than
a minute, anyhow so we duck under it——"</p>
<p>He did not make computations. There was no time. The
war rocket might have started at four or five gravities acceleration,
but it would speed up as its fuel burned. It might be
accelerating at fifteen gravities now, and have an attained
velocity of four miles a second and still increasing. If the
little ship ducked under it, it could not kill that rate-of-climb
in time to follow in a stern chase.</p>
<p>"Haney!" panted Joe. "Watch out the port! Are we going
to make it?"</p>
<p>Haney crawled forward. Joe had forgotten the radar because
he'd seen the rocket with his own eyes. It seemed to
need eyes to watch it. Mike spoke curtly into the microphone
broadcasting to ground. He was reporting each action and
order as it took place and was given. There was no time to<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_71" id="Page_71"></SPAN></span>
explain anything. But Mike thought of the radar. He watched
it.</p>
<p>It showed the vast curve of Earth's surface, 400 miles down.
It showed a moving pip, much too much nearer, which was
the war rocket. Mike made a dot 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.</p>
<p>They formed a curving line—curved because the rocket
was accelerating—which moved inexorably toward the center
of the radar screen. The curve would cut the screen's exact
center. That meant collision.</p>
<p>"Too close, Joe!" said Mike shrilly. "We may miss it, but
not enough!"</p>
<p>"Then hold fast," yelled Joe. "Landing rockets firing, three—two—one!"</p>
<p>The bellowing of the landing-rockets smote their ears.
Weight seized upon them, three gravities of acceleration
toward the rushing flood of clouds and solidity which was the
Earth. The ship plunged downward with all its power. It was
intolerable—and ten times worse because they had been
weightless so long and were still shaken and sore and bruised
from the air-graze only minutes back.</p>
<p>Mike took acceleration better than the others, but his voice
was thin when he gasped, "Looks—like this does it, Joe!"
Seconds later he gasped again, "Right! The rocket's above us
and still going away!"</p>
<p>The gyros squealed again. The ship plunged into vapor
which was the trail of the enemy rocket. For an instant the
flowing confusion which was Earth was blotted out. Then it
was visible again. The ship was plunging downward, but its
sidewise speed was undiminished and much greater than
its rate of fall.</p>
<p>"Mike," panted Joe. "Get the news out. What we did—and
why. I'm—going to turn the ship's head back on our—course.
We can't slow enough but—I'd rather crash on Earth
than let them blast us——"</p>
<p>The ship turned again. It pointed back in the direction
from which it had come. With the brutal sternward pressure<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_72" id="Page_72"></SPAN></span>
produced by the landing-rockets, it felt as if it were speeding
madly back where it had come from. It was the sensation
they'd felt when the ship took off from Earth, so long before.
But then the cloud masses and the earth beneath had flowed
toward the ship and under it. Now they flowed away. The
appearance was that of an unthinkably swift wake left behind
by a ship at sea. The Earth's surface fled away and fled
away from them.</p>
<p>"Crazy, this!" Joe muttered thickly. "If the ship were
lighter—or we had more power—we could land! I'm sorry,
but I'd rather——"</p>
<p>Haney turned his head from where he clung near the bow-ports.
His features changed slowly as he talked because of
acceleration-driven blood engorging his lips and bloating his
cheeks. After one instant he closed his eyes fiercely. They
felt as if they would pop out of his head. He gasped, "Yes!
Get down to air-resistance. A chance—not good but a chance—ejection
seats—with space suits—might make it...."</p>
<p>He began to let himself back toward his acceleration chair.
He could not possibly have climbed forward. It was a horrible
task to let himself down, with triple his normal weight
pulling at him and after the beating taken a little while ago.</p>
<p>Sweat stood out on his skin as he lowered himself sternward.
Once his grip on a hand-line slipped and he had to
sustain the drag of nearly six hundred pounds by a single hand
and arm. It would not be a good idea to fall at three gravities.</p>
<p>The landing rockets roared and roared, and Joe tilted the
bow down a little farther, so that the streaming flood of
clouds drew nearer.</p>
<p>Haney got to his acceleration chair. He let himself into it
and his eyes closed.</p>
<p>Mike's sharp voice barked: "What's the chance, Haney?"</p>
<p>Haney's mouth opened, and closed, and opened again.
"Rocket flames," he gasped, "pushed back—wind—splash on
hull—may melt—lighten weight—hundred to one against——"</p>
<p>The odds were worse than that. The ship couldn't land
because its momentum was too great for the landing rockets
to cancel out. If it had weighed five tons instead of twenty,<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_73" id="Page_73"></SPAN></span>
landing might have been possible. Haney was saying that
if the ship were to be lowered into air while rushing irresistibly
sternward despite its rockets, that the rocket flames
might be splashed out by the wind. Instead of streaking
astern in a lance-like shape, they might be pushed out like a
rocket blast when it hits the earth in a guided missile take-off.
Such a blast spreads out flat in all directions. Here the
rocket flames might be spread by wind until they played upon
the hull of the ship. If they did, they might melt it as they
melted their own steel cases in firing. And three-fourths or
more of the hull might be torn loose from the cabin bow
section. So much was unlikely, but it was possible.</p>
<p>The impossible odds were that the four could survive even
if the cabin were detached. They were decelerating at three
gravities now. If part of the ship burned or melted or was
torn away, the rocket thrust might speed the cabin up to
almost any figure. And there is a limit to the number of
gravities a man can take, even in an acceleration chair.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, that was what Haney proposed. They were
due to be killed anyhow. Joe tried it.</p>
<p>He dived into atmosphere. At 60 miles altitude a thin
wailing seemed to develop without reason. At 40 miles, the
ship had lost more than two miles per second of its speed since
the landing-rockets were ignited, and there was a shuddering
in all its fabric—though because of the loss of speed it was
not as bad as the atmosphere-graze. At 30 it began to shake
and tremble. At 25 miles high there was as horrible a vibration
and as deadly a deceleration as at the air-graze. At 12
miles above the surface of the Earth the hull temperature indicators
showed the hind part of the hull at red heat. The
ship happened to be traveling backward at several times the
speed of sound, and air could not move away from before it.
It was compressed to white heat at the entering surface, and
the metal plating went to bright red heat at that point. But
the hull just aft of the rocket mouths was hotter still. There
the splashing rocket flames bathed it in intolerable incandescence.
Hull plates, braces and beams glared white——</p>
<p>The tip of the tail caved in. The ship's empty cargo space<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_74" id="Page_74"></SPAN></span>
was instantly filled with air at intolerable pressure and heat.</p>
<p>The hull exploded outward where the rocket flames played.
There was a monstrous, incredible jerking of the cabin that
remained. That fraction of the ship received the full force
of the rocket thrust. They could decelerate it at a rate of
fifteen gravities or more.</p>
<p>They did.</p>
<p>Joe lost consciousness as instantly and as peacefully as if
he had been hit on the jaw.</p>
<p>An unknown but brief time later, he found himself listening
with a peculiar astonishment. The rockets had burned
out. They had lasted only seconds after the separation of the
ship into two fragments. Radars on the ground are authority
for this. Those few seconds were extremely important. The
cabin lost an additional half-mile per second of velocity,
which was enough to make the difference between the cabin
heating up too, and the cabin being not quite destroyed.</p>
<p>The cabin remnant was heavy, of course, but it was an
irregular object, some twenty feet across. It was below orbital
velocity, and wind-resistance slowed it. Even so, it traveled
47 miles to the east in falling the last 10 miles to Earth. It
hit a hillside and dug itself a 70-foot crater in the ground.</p>
<p>But there was nobody in it, then. A little over a month
before, it had seemed to Joe that ejection seats were the most
useless of all possible pieces of equipment to have in a space
ship. He'd been as much mistaken as anybody could be.
With an ejection seat, a jet pilot can be shot out of a plane
traveling over Mach one, and live to tell about it. This
crumpling cabin fell fast, but Joe stuffed Mike in an ejection
seat and shot him out. He and the Chief dragged Haney to a
seat, and then the Chief shoved Joe off—and the four of them,
one by one, were flung out into a screaming stream of air.
But the ribbon-parachutes did not burst. They nearly broke
the necks of their passengers, but they let them down almost
gently.</p>
<p>And it was quite preposterous, but all four landed intact.
Mike, being lightest and first to be ejected, came down by
himself in a fury because he'd been treated with special favor.<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_75" id="Page_75"></SPAN></span>
The Chief and Joe landed almost together. After a long
time, Joe staggered out of his space suit and harness and tried
to help the Chief, and they held each other up as they stumbled
off together in search of Haney.</p>
<p>When they found him he was sleeping heavily, exhausted,
in a canebrake. He hadn't even bothered to disengage his
parachute harness or take off his suit.</p>
<hr style="width: 65%;" />
<div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />