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At three hundred miles an hour the Sandra had nicked the upper plates of the dome and streaked on, unharmed! It was not necessary now to use infra-red glasses to see the asteroid. It was there in the visi-screen for naked eyes, but for seconds not one of the men in the ship's control-cabin thought to look. The awful acceleration and shock had dazed them.
From him above all men had that location up to now been kept. Just a few days before, Hawk Carse had risked his life to preserve the secret. And yet now, deliberately, he was showing it to the Eurasian! Nervously, Friday watched him, and he saw that his eyes were alive with interest as they scanned the visi-screen. It was too much for the Negro.
The indicators of the positionals quivered a little and altered, and in the visi-screen the hills of the valley, that a moment before had been quite close and large, had diminished to purple-green mounds below. Then the accelerating sensations began. Carse had the "feel" of the asteroidal ship and his controlling hand grew bolder.
"I heard a hiss!" said Friday. "You too? Then it was a port-lock!" Carse turned to the visi-screen. "Look there!" he cried. In the screen Earth made a titanic background against which, a falling, dwindling figure in a clear-cut in the sunlight, gleamed space-suit. Down it went, rapidly, even as they stared, until it hung just off the also-falling asteroid.
This might be natural in most men, but it was unusual in the Hawk. Often the negro found him abstractedly smoothing his bangs of hair, pacing the length of the control cabin, glancing, plainly worried, at the visi-screen. What special thing was wrong? Friday wondered again and again and then, in a flash, he knew. "Why how we goin' to see Dr. Ku?" he burst out. "Didn't that Judd say somethin' "
Then I'll be down to you. Have the upper entrance ready." The Hawk turned back to the controls. Taking the space-stick out of neutral, he moved it very slightly down and to one side. Ban and Friday, not understanding his intention, watched the visi-screen. The whole mass of rock that was the asteroid changed position at a gentle speed.
They had heard from Ku Sui, but that had not answered the old tormenting question of how he would come. It was more puzzling than ever. The visi-screen showed nothing, and it should have shown the Eurasian's decelerating ship even at twice thirty minutes' time away.
From time to time he grasped the butt of his ray-gun with a grip that would have pulped an orange; occasionally his rolling brown eyes sought the gray ones of the Hawk, only to return as by a magnet to the visi-screen, whose five adjoining squares mirrored the whole sweep of space around them. Jupiter now filled one side of the forward observation window.
Interrupting, he cried out: "They must be attacking! A light just flashed in the dome!" With his words they all saw the light. The visi-screen, though it did not reveal the asteroid, showed the first weapon with which it struck a lustrous ray of purple which in a blink had leaped out to the Sandra and enfolded her.
It was night the visi-screen showed only a star-dusted, moonless-sky, and dark shadows below. He snapped another switch; for a few micro-seconds a beam of intense light was turned on, automatically photographing the landscape under him. A second later, the developed picture was projected upon another screen; it showed only wooded mountains and a barren, brush-grown valley.
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