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Updated: May 25, 2025
The ship was to take off presently, as soon as this planet had turned enough for the space-ship's nose to point nearly in the direction of their next target. They had two hours for exploration. They came upon something which lay still across their path, like a great serpent. Cochrane looked at it startledly.
He was almost dozing when Babs touched his arm. "Space-suits, Mr. Cochrane." He got wearily into the clumsy costume. But he saw again that Babs wore the shining-eyed look of rapturous adventure that he had seen her wear before. They got out of the moon-jeep, one after the other. The sling came down the space-ship's gleaming side. They got in it, together. It lifted them.
Cochrane sent Babs and Holden up the sling, first, while he waited down below. It was a singular sensation to stand there. He was the only human being afoot on a planet the size of Earth or larger, at the foot of a cliff of metal which was the space-ship's hull. He had a weapon in his hand, and it should defend him from anything. But he felt very lonely. The sling came down for him.
One was a very flat cone, much like a coolie-hat and hardly larger, with a sort of power-pack of coils and batteries attached. The other was a space-ship's distress-signal rocket, designed to make a twenty-mile streak of red flame in emptiness. Nobody had yet figured out what good a distress signal would do, between Earth and moon, but the idea was soothing.
But any who might be hiding had so much to lose if they were discovered that they might be hundreds or even thousands of miles from anywhere a space-ship would normally land if they hadn't fled after the incident of the space-ship's departure with its load of doomed passengers. Considered detachedly, the odds were that there was again a food-shortage on Dara.
The space-ship leaned, and leaned.... Cochrane's lips tensed. The space-ship's rockets bellowed and a storm of hurtling smoke flashed up around it. It lifted, staggering as its steering-jets tried frantically to swing its lower parts underneath its mass. It lurched violently, and the rockets flamed terribly. It lifted again. Its tail was higher than the trees, but it did not point straight up.
The camera panned slowly, and showed such open spaces as very few humans had ever seen unencumbered by buildings, and mountains of a grandeur difficult for most people to believe in. The scene cut to the space-ship's control-room and Al the pilot acted briskly as the leader of an exploration-party just returned though he actually hadn't left the ship.
Reversing the Sandra's ends had neither increased nor decreased the rate at which the asteroid's purple stream was bringing her closer. Obviously the magnetic stream was being varied. The space-ship's forward momentum merely continued to drop normally until the moment came when she had no Earthward velocity at all; and then more quickly she moved toward the restraining asteroid.
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