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Roger glided the jet boat to a smooth stop on the night side of the planetoid. "How much longer before the reactor units go up?" asked Shinny. Connel turned, thinking he had heard something on the communicators, then answered Shinny's question. "Only four hours," he said. The crew of spacemen climbed out of the jet boat into the still blackness of the night side of the planet.
Thus far, then, he had succeeded. He had had to pick his time precisely. The people who were already on this small planetoid could not use their detection equipment while the planetoid itself was within detection range of Beacon 971, only two hundred and eighty miles away. Not if they wanted to keep from being found.
"I don't care if we all wind up as cinders," said Tom, "I'm coming in!" The communicator went dead and from the left, over the close horizon of the small satellite, the Polaris swept into view like a red-tailed fire dragon. It shot up in a pretouchdown maneuver, and then began to drop slowly to the surface of the planetoid.
Their paths, although more eccentric, are all contained in planes that nearly correspond with the planes of the planetary orbits, and they travel in these paths in the same general direction with their planetary brethren in every case. The planetoid comets of short period are Encke's, De Vico's, Brorsen's, D'Arrest's, Biela's, and Fage's.
We'll see what we can do though," muttered Arcot. A plane of artificial matter formed just beneath it, and sheared it from its bed on the planetoid, cutting through the heavy cosmium anchors. The framework lifted, and the apparatus with it. A series of planes, a gigantic honeycomb formed, and the apparatus was cut across again and again, till only small fragments were left of it.
For minutes a host of robots toiled mightily, then a portion of the shield bulged out, extended into a tube beyond the attacking layers of force, and from it there erupted a beam of violence incredible. A beam behind which was every volt and ampere that the gigantic generators and accumulators of the planetoid could yield.
Out of the earth a huge portion was split, and it became as the moon you tell of, only dark. It circled about the earth " "By Jove!" cried Stern, and started to his feet. "That dark patch in the sky! That moving mystery we saw nights at the bungalow on the Hudson!" "You mean " the girl exclaimed. "It's a new planetoid! Another satellite of the earth! It's the split-off part of the world!"
To them life on a planet like Earth was as life to a terrestrian on a planetoid such as Ceres, Juno or Eros would have seemed. Even on Thettsost, the satellite planet of Thett, life was strange, and they used lux roofs over their cities, though their weight there was four tons!
"Just be sure you give me a good course, Manning," grunted Astro, heaving his huge frame out of the small cabin of the jet boat, "and I'll give you all the thrust you want!" Astro secured the jet boats while Roger closed the air-lock hatch, shutting out the last view of the rugged little planetoid. Roger threw the landscape a mocking kiss. "So long, Junior! See you back home!"
Venone had planetoid stations, that projected molecular rays of an intensity I wonder at, with their system of projecting. It seems these people have force-power feeds that operate through space, by which an entire solar system can tie in for power, and they fed these stations in that way. Lord only knows what tubes they had, but the Thessians couldn't get the power to fight.
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