We could not tell. It seemed that their curve would take them behind
our stern. Grantline added: "Will you try going back after that ship?"
"Yes."
But I did not. To the naked eye the enemy ship had already
disappeared; but with the 'scopes we saw that it seemed to be turning.
I did not attempt to turn us, for we were afraid of those oncoming
discs which took all our attention. They passed within five miles
astern of us, but in a great curve they swung and now seemed heading
across our bow. With what tremendous velocity they had been endowed by
their firing mechanisms! Their elliptical curve swung them a mile or
so ahead of us.
They were circling us like tiny satellites in a narrowing spiral
ellipse. Our attraction, the normal gravity of our close bulk, was
drawing them to us.
The men on the _Cometara's_ deck stood gazing, surprised but not yet
alarmed. The lookout calls sounded with routine notification each time
the discs passed across our bow and stern. In the helio cubby, Waters
was still trying to raise an Earth station.
Grantline came running to the control turret. "If those cursed things,
should strike us, Gregg!"
I had set the gravity-plates into new combinations, turning our course
downward, trying to swing us under the plane of the discs' orbit. But
they swung downward with us; they were no more than two thousand feet
away now.