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Koa stepped behind Kemp and leaned against his back, because the flame of the torch was like an exhaust, driving Kemp backward. Kemp bent down and the torch sliced into the metal of the asteroid like a hot knife into ice. The metal splintered a little as the heat raised it instantly from almost absolute zero to many thousands of degrees.
He went headlong, shooting like a rocket three feet above the ground. His board flew away at a tangent. His stylus sped out of his glove like a miniature projectile, and the slide rule clanged against his bubble. It happened so fast that neither Koa nor Santos had time to grab him. The action had given him extra speed, and he saw with horror that he was going to crash into Trudeau.
The boats seemed to be crisscrossing the asteroid in a definite pattern. A pair streaked past, and something sped downward from one of them, trailing yellow flame. It exploded in a ball of molten fire that licked across the asteroid in waves. Rip tensed, then saw that the chemical would burn out before it reached them. "Fire bomb," Koa muttered. Rip nodded. He had recognized it.
Get this, and get it straight. At twenty-three-oh-five, fire the bomb. Fire it whether I’m back or not. Got that?" Koa replied, "Got it, sir." That would give the Planeteers a minute’s leeway. Not much of a safety margin, especially when he wasn’t sure how much power the improvised atomic charge would produce. He plugged into the snapper-boat’s communicator and called, "Ready, Santos?"
Then, as Rip was enjoying the comfort of air during his off-watch hour in the boat compartment, Koa beat an alarm on the door. Rip and the Planeteers with him hurriedly got into space suits and opened up. "It’s Terra base calling on the communicator, sir," Koa reported. "Urgent message, they said, and they want to talk to you, personally." Rip hurried to the base cave.
The snapper-boat changed direction, and for a fraction of a second stern and side tubes "fought" each other, making the boat yaw wildly. Then it straightened out on a new course. Koa exclaimed, "That's a drone!" Rip got it then. A pilotless snapper-boat! That's why its actions were a little uneven. Only one thing could explain its deliberate slowness. It was bait.
"Follow me," he directed. Rip picked up the instrument and carried it to a point ninety degrees from the line represented by Koa and Santos. He put the instrument down and zeroed it on Messier 44, the Beehive star cluster in the constellation Cancer.
The rest of Rip's Planeteers had resumed duties on the space platform. He saw them frequently, because they made a point of dropping in whenever they were near the hospital area. Koa looked out at the asteroid. "I sort of hate to see that rock cut up.
"I mean, if you were looking over this asteroid and you weren’t sure whether the enemy had it or not, how close would you get?" "Probably about one AU," Rip said jokingly. That was one astronomical unit, equal to about 93 million miles, the distance from earth to the sun. "That would be a good, safe distance, sir," Koa agreed with a grin.
"Sir, this is dangerous, but there's just as much danger without it. I'm going to tie off that arm." Rip knew what Koa meant. He stood quietly as the big sergeant major put the line around his arm above the wound, then put his massive strength into the task of pulling the line tight. The heavy fabric of the suit was stiff, and the air pressure gave further resistance that had to be overcome.
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