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Updated: May 1, 2025
But close. Around thirty thousand miles, maybe. It's Snap Dean calling." The Planetara here within thirty thousand miles! Excitement and pleasure swept the room. The Planetara had for so long been awaited eagerly! The excitement communicated to Grantline.
It shone clear on the grid the segment of star-field with a tiny cigar-shaped blob. Clear enough to be unmistakable. The Planetara! Here now, over the Moon, almost directly overhead, poised at what the altimeter scale showed to be a fraction under thirty thousand miles. The men gazed in awed silence. The Planetara coming.... But the altimeter needle was motionless.
The silence and the deadly chill of death would soon be here in these wrecked corridors. The end of the Planetara. We prowled like ghouls. We did not see Coniston. Snap had been by the shifter pumps. We found him in the oval doorway. He lay sprawled. Dead? No, he moved. He sat up before we could get to him. He seemed confused, but his senses clarified with the movement of our figures over him.
I could see from where I sat at the table that there was a forward observatory tower under the dome quite near here. The ship was laid out in rather similar fashion to the Planetara, though considerably smaller. Potan had dismissed his men from the cubby so as to be alone with us.
When we are in control of this ship...." It sent a shiver through me. Were they planning to try and seize the Planetara? Now? It seemed so. "Johnson undoubtedly memorized them," Moa was saying. "When we get him out " "Hahn is to do that, at the signal." Miko added, "George could do it better, perhaps." And then I heard George Prince for the first time, "I'll try."
"I got one slight television swing a minute ago then it faded. I think it's the Planetara." "Planetara!" The crowding group of men chorused. How could it be the Planetara? But it was. The call came in presently. Unmistakably the Planetara, turned back now from her course to Ferrok-Shahn. "How far away, Peter?" The duty man consulted the needles of his dial scale. "Close! Very weak infra-red.
A long swing the shadows and patterns on the starlit deck were all shifting. The Planetara was turning. The heavens revolved in a great round sweep of movement, then settled as we took our new course. Hahn at the turret controls had swung us. The Earth and the Sun showed over our bow quarter. The sunlight mingled red-yellow with the brilliant starlight.
The end of the Planetara! The three grotesque figures of Anita, Venza and Snap had started off. Hunchback figures with the tanks mounted on their shoulders. I bounded and caught them. I touched Snap. We made audiphone contact. "Which way do you think?" I demanded. "I think this way, down the ramp. Away from Archimedes, toward the mountains. It shouldn't be too far." "You run with Venza.
I could agree with him there.... It was now six A.M. Snap had been busy all night with routine cosmos-radios from the Earth, following our departure. He had a pile of them beside him. "Nothing queer looking?" I suggested. "No. Not a thing." We were at this time no more than sixty-five thousand miles from the Moon's surface. The Planetara presently would swing upon her direct course for Mars.
This grim, desolate, silent landscape! Beyond the ramp, fifty feet below us, a tumbled naked plain stretched away into blurred distance. But I could see mountains off there. Behind us, the towering, frowning rampart-wall of Archimedes loomed against the sky. I had turned to look back at the Planetara. She lay broken, wedged between spires of upstanding rock. A few of her lights still gleamed.
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