"A yo-yo?"
"Yes, a yo-yo. That's all." She was belligerent.
"A _yo-yo_!" Bob Parker yelled the word and almost hit the ceiling, he
got out of the chair so fast. "Can you imagine it! A yo-yo!"
He disappeared from the room. "Queazy!" he shouted. "_Queazy, I've got
it!_"
* * * * *
It was Queazy who got into his space-suit and did the welding job,
fastening two huge supra-steel "eyes" onto the dumbbell-shaped ship's
narrow midsection. Into these eyes cables which trailed back to
two winches in the big ship's nose were inserted, welded fast, and
reinforced.
The nose of the hauler was blunt, perfectly fitted for the job. Bob
Parker practiced and experimented for three hours with this yo-yo of
cosmic dimensions, while Starre and Queazy stood over him bursting into
strange, delighted squeals of laughter whenever the yo-yo reached the
end of its double cable and started rolling back up to the ship. Queazy
snapped his fingers.
"It'll work!" His gray eyes showed satisfaction. "Now, if only the
Saylor brothers are where we calculated!"
They weren't where Bob and Queazy had calculated, as they had
discovered the next day. They had expected to pick up the asteroid
on their mass-detectors a few hundred thousand miles outside of the
Moon's orbit. But now they saw the giant ship attached like a leech to
the still bigger asteroid--inside the Moon's orbit! A mere two hundred
thousand miles from Earth!
"We have to work fast," Bob stammered, sweating. He got within
naked-eye distance of the Saylor brothers' ship. Below, Earth was
spread out, a huge crescent shape, part of the Eastern hemisphere
vaguely visible through impeding clouds and atmosphere. The enemy ship
was two miles distant, a black shadow occulting part of the brilliant
sky. It was moving along a down-spiraling path toward Earth.