Sixty-five million miles out beyond the huge red ball of Centauri VI
the small space ship suddenly dropped into normal space. It pitched
drunkenly, every separate member of its construction squealing in
protest. Pell realized they were all too close to mass, but it couldn't
be helped.
At 600 miles per second the ship hurtled toward Centaura, steadily
eating up the distance. He cut the converter and every other power
source in the ship except the detector sensitives which he fastened to
his wrists. On DIC radar the little Mark III would be a black speck,
unnoticeable against the huge disc of Centauri VI, and the backlash of
enemy radiation detectors combined with their Heisenberg Factors ruled
that method out unless their ships were within a range of 500,000 miles.
The pale glow of the Alpha Centauri sun shed a dim illumination about
the control room. Pell turned to Gret and grinned recklessly at her.
"You'll have to put up with 72 hours of this--then the fun begins."
The slight motion of his head propelled his weightless body out of the
shock chair in which he had been sprawled. He instinctively extended
his arm to stop his upward motion and touched Gret's hand. He pulled it
slightly and she rose gently from the chair and into his arms.
There was warmth in her lips, but even more in her kisses.
The detector sensitives fastened to Pell's wrists had been twinging
more frequently and more painfully. They were less than five million
miles from their goal--only three hours from the blue-green disc that
blossomed and expanded even as they watched it in the screen.
"Better put on your shock suit, Gret. We've come as far as it is
safe--we've got to decelerate now," he said.
Grunting with annoyance, he tried to shrug himself into the weightless
garment which slithered about in his grasp. He flipped on the suit's
power and sighed with satisfaction at the gentle kneading of the
massagers. He clipped his liquid-cushioned eye-stops in place and
squeezed into his seat, putting on the helmet.
"Ready now, Pell," Gret's voice came out over the inter-com.
Pell grunted and began to wind up the converter. Somewhere deep in the
ship's bowels it began to sing up the scale as the starter electros
were clutched in. His detector began to clack and clatter busily as
its relays responded to the impact of DIC radar which converged on the
ship. Pell smiled mirthlessly as he fed full converter thrust to the
braking jets and waited expectantly for the detector to give him the
alarm.
It did so--soon.
The red warning lights flickered and the alarm clamored intermittently
up and down the scale. They had his position and orbit now.
The minutes of waiting piled up with agonizing slowness. Pell turned
down the sensitives of the detector. Its constant shrilling assaulted
his ear-drums painfully. Steadily he fed braking thrust to the forward
jets until the needle stood at a body-battering 19 G's. He turned up
the oxygen flow in his helmet with a flexing of his cheek muscles. His
backbone felt as if it were in imminent danger of being forced through
his body and blackness hung just off the edges of his vision.
Somewhere out there in that star-studded blackness was the enemy.
The main body was not in detector range yet, but it was there,
nevertheless. Jockeying into position, warming up their blasters,
swinging turrets to hair-line accuracy and waiting ... waiting....
His detector clattered determinedly now. Pell glanced at it. A brief
smile flitted over his hard, tensed features. At least two were out of
range.
Experimentally he flicked his blaster switch and was pleased with the
deadly cones of blue radiance which flickered from the gun snouts.
_There! And there!_ Converging above and below the nose of his ship
were swarms of deadly little two-man Mark IX's. Dimly he could make out
in the detector screen the deadly blue lattice-work of blaster beams
that awaited him.
Under this pressure his mind worked like a machine with the speed of
light, analyzing, rejecting, planning, replanning.... As they blew up
in size with fantastic speed on the screen, Pell acted like lightning.
In a blurring motion he cut the converter, fell free for an instant,
wound up the converter to the aft jets and thrust up--up, and suddenly
out of range.
But the enemy had anticipated his move. As he eased the thrust from the
aft jets, two points of light twinkled and blossomed in the duration of
a single heart-beat into his screen. A pair of DIC fighters! And they
had him like a cold pigeon!
* * * * *
For one brief instant Pell was paralyzed and that was long enough for
the enemy. The whistling _whoosh_ of air escaping through a rent in the
hull died away as the automatic self-sealers went into action, but it
gave vivid testimony of the enemy's aim.
Reacting like a coiled spring, Pell jabbed his blaster switch, catching
one of the DIC fighters squarely in his sights. It seemed to fall to
pieces in the midst of the minor nova of its own disintegration. The
second enemy fighter flashed past like a bullet, but not before Pell
chewed off half its aft jets with his blasters.
For a moment he was in the clear. Quickly he examined the function
dials; found to his dismay that his aft jets were nothing more than
slag now, with all the tube connections severed.
"What ... what happened?" Gret gasped.
"We've been in a fight, baby, and we got a black eye," Pell cracked.
"But don't worry--I'll set this can down in spite of those missing
jets."
He bent over his instruments again, a furrow slowly forming between his
brows. That fight had taken time--too much valuable time. He had just
two hours to decelerate from the tremendous velocity of the ship to the
comparative slow velocity of Centauri V.
Discarding the last of his caution, he crammed all the braking thrust
possible on the ancient converter. Up--up went the gravity needle; up
past the red line at 23 G's; up past a heart-wracking 27 G's; up to an
inconceivable thirty gravities where it quivered sluggishly.
Pell's body weighed over two and a half tons! His eyes weighed five
pounds each and thrust agonizingly against their liquid cushion
transparent stops. The converter screamed its super-sonic thunder,
setting the separate members of the ship's body to vibrating madly.
Every moment was red-hazed agony of an eon's duration; every second a
year of exquisite pain.
The blue-green disc of Centauri V expanded visibly in the screen. Even
through the observation shield Pell could make out its crescent. The
brake jets were doing their work--but it would be a near thing--a very
near thing. Pell prayed that there would be no more fighters; aside
from the fact that he couldn't maneuver, he could still less afford to
lose the time.
When the ball of Centaura puffed over all the screen and its edges were
no longer visible, Pell broadcast the prearranged signal of recognition
to the planet-mounted blaster batteries below. Scrambled almost beyond
analysis and recognition, the acknowledging signal came back.
Suddenly Pell realized that Centaura's curvature had ballooned to
flatness and on the heels of that realization came the whispering,
high-pitched wail of a ship travelling at high velocity in thin
atmosphere. Rapidly the wail became an ear-shattering, sustained
screech and the small warning lights of the hull thermometers began to
glow redly.
Nose _outward_, rather than pointed _down_, Pell continued to brake the
ship with all forward thrust, depending upon the planet's attraction to
prevent him from hurtling off into space on a tangent and into the jaws
of the DIC fleet.
Pell never remembered how many times he blacked out, nor how many
revolutions of the planet he made. Shaking the ever encroaching
blackness from the borders of his vision, Pell had a fleeting memory of
a heavily-forested mountain flashing by beneath, followed by a fertile
plateau, a river, then mountains rising ahead.
Streaking over these with a cushion of fire thrust before it, the
ship hurtled at a visibly slower pace down a rocky gorge with jagged
mountains on each side. Then, decelerated almost to a stop, the
battered space ship seemed to poise for an instant, then turned over
gently and gouged a deep furrow in the soft ground. For perhaps 400
yards it smashed through low timber and came to a halt at the brink of
a small stream where the scream of rending metal finally died away.
The last thing Pell remembered was cutting out the converter.