The Lancaster turned ever so slightly until the starship was directly
on the point-of-drive. His other hand touched the drive and the
acceleration increased a bit. Caustically, Farradyne said, "Go ahead
and shoot! You'll find your own living room full of by-products if you
do!"
He was right. The Lancaster was on collision course with the starship
and if the Lancaster was blasted at this moment shards and fragments of
the spacecraft would spread like a shotgun charge, and if the starship
escaped being hit with a rather uncomfortably large mass of jagged
metal it would be because of sheer luck.
"Veer off!" came the strident cry.
"I'm going to ram you, damn you!" roared Farradyne.
The starship flared at its tail and at the same time a torpedo-port
winked as a missile blasted off. Farradyne gauged the missile and the
starship and kept his nose on the starship's lead. Gritting his
teeth he watched the missile come at him as he held his course by
sheer nerve. At the last moment the missile veered aside, obviously
controlled by the enemy to keep from hitting him. It was a war of
nerves.
The starship loomed big in the astrodome and Farradyne aimed the
Lancaster amidships. The interstellar monster grew rapidly until the
individual plates could be seen. Then with a silent, dark flicker that
was as shocking as a loud blast and a searing flare might have been,
the starship quietly ceased to exist as an obstacle in front of them.
They had resorted to the ultradrive at the last moment. The sky was
clear....
Except for the missile, seeking them and with no control to stop it.
It had curved in a vast circle behind them and was now closing in from
behind. The radar pip leaked across the screen; the missile must be
coming at them by several thousand gravities.
"You'll have to take this," gritted Farradyne to Norma. "Hunker down in
the seat."
His hands ran across the board and the Lancaster turned in space
slightly while the drive went up to six gravities. The flare behind
them lengthened with the increased power, and the Lancaster took
a slight side-vector to its course as the flare was aimed at the
seeking-missile that was homing on them.
Insensate, unable to understand the maneuver, the missile followed its
finding-gear and roared up into the long trail of reaction flare. The
flare was a by-product of water, stored in its tank as a reaction-mass.
It was heated by the atomic pile to an energy that destroyed the
molecular affinity of hydrogen for oxygen and then stripped the
electrons from their orbits, and when that was done, the nucleus of
the oxygen broke up into eight protons and eight neutrons and added
their binding energy to the drive. The flare was sheer gamma and sheer
bombardment and the word "heat" had no real meaning, until the reaction
blast touched something that was massive enough to absorb the energy.
The missile absorbed this energy, was bombarded back from the
Lancaster, and ultimately melted to join with the flare because its
mechanism could not function to start the fission of the atomics in the
warhead.
There was a sparkling burst from behind, like a monster signal flare.
That was all.
Farradyne cut the drive back to a more comfortable level and relaxed a
moment to let his body rest. Norma had blacked out briefly, but came to
as soon as the drive had been cut.
Ahead of them Terra loomed moon-sized in the middle of the astrodome,
and behind them the radar wiggled its tail at extreme-range again.
The range closed, and Farradyne with a grunt juggled his levers. The
drive rose once more and the pressure increased. The range closed more
slowly, but still the starship came on.
"You can't make it, Farradyne," the radio blared exultantly.
Farradyne laughed into the microphone and cut it dead with a flick of
his hand. "We may not make it," he told Norma, "but we won't end up as
live cowards!"
Terra loomed larger and larger as the range closed between the
Lancaster and the ship behind it. Norma cried out, and Farradyne looked
through the telescope to see the giveaway annular flare. The enemy had
fired another torpedo.
He laughed and Norma touched his arm; he turned to smile at the deep
concern and puzzlement on her face.
"They know we can louse it with our drive," he said. "And they know
that while that thing is coming up from behind we cannot possibly make
a turn-over and start decelerating for a landing. It's a thoughtful
tactic on their part--they hope."
"But I don't see--"
"Well, they know I won't pile up on Terra. I'll steer to miss. No doubt
they have another starship on the other side of the planet, waiting
to intercept us out here after I elude the missile. Maybe they have a
whole space net flung out. So hunker down, while I cut some didoes."
The radar showed the picture. The starship, now fearful of being
detected by one of the long-range jobs on Terra, veered away on a
tangent, while between them came the missile. Before them, the huge,
solid-looking pip that indicated the bulking Terra, crept closer and
closer. Farradyne cranked the rate-of-change dials and looked at the
figures and nodded; the enemy had computed their missile's drive
beautifully. It would meet the Lancaster at about the same time the
Lancaster met Terra. Since everybody knew that Farradyne was not going
to plow into Terra head on, he would have to steer to one side, but in
order to keep from being hit by the missile, he would have to keep on
driving right past Terra and out into space again--into the arms of the
net on the other side, waiting outside the radar range from Terra.
The alternative was to cut the drive and try to land, and if this were
tried the missile would blast the Lancaster far above Terra, long
before the ship could signal its home planet that there was danger in
space.
The missile's range closed home and Farradyne hiked the drive until the
reaction-trail was a sun-bright fury and consumed the missile in its
fierceness.
He cut the drive dead just in time to hear the first screaming
complaint of the superstratosphere. Farradyne hit the upper reaches of
Terra's air blanket at a point so high that the air there was a fairly
hard vacuum, but the speed of the ship was high enough to pile quite
a bit of air in front of it. The accelerometer went crazy, reading
peg-stop against the end of the scale to the left. Their seat belts cut
their thighs and the blood rushed to their heads. Norma's arms were
flung above her head, but Farradyne fought the pressure that tried to
lift his arms; he kept his hands on the control panel and caressed his
levers gently so that the Lancaster pinwheeled.
The screaming of the air grew louder as the ship turned broadside, then
diminished as its tail came around to align itself with the course of
flight. Then with the pressure coming from the right direction again,
Farradyne waited until the scream of tortured upper stratosphere
faded away and the braking pressure stopped. He hit the drive as the
Lancaster soared on past Terra.
Though the enemy must have been awaiting him on the line of flight past
Terra, the Lancaster came nowhere near them. Its course had changed
from the usual straight line to a long ellipse and the first turn of
the curve had wound their course so far from the anticipated point that
the enemy could not move over in time to intercept him. Terra rotated
madly below and to the side, then came moving up in the angle of vision
until it was at forty-five degrees off the nose and still rising.
Once more Terra loomed close and once more came the scream of air,
deeper and yet shriller as Farradyne cut the drive and let the
air-brake take over. They went on around Terra in a close ellipse, the
air-screech rising and falling as their altitude changed.
Three times around Terra they went, then Farradyne turned his tail
straight down with a few hard blasts and started to drop like a plummet.
Far to one side came a light flare and the radio gabbled something
that Farradyne was too busy to catch; in the distance a jet freighter
trailed a line of vapor and far to the south ultra-brightness of
a spacecraft take-off trail climbed into the sky. Farradyne, busy
checking the controls, the autopilot and the computing radar altimeter,
aimed the Lancaster for the southern edge of Lake Superior, and they
came down in a screaming fall.
The flare parted the waters of the Lake and sent up a billow of steam
for about a hundredth of a second. The autopilot cut the drive and the
violence ceased as the Lancaster sank into the deep, cool waters, to
stop, to come rising buoyantly toward the surface again.
Farradyne hit the switch that opened the scuttlebutt of the water tank
and the lake waters rushed in, killing their buoyancy.
The astrodome porpoised once, gently, and then the Lancaster sank
very slowly. Farradyne waited until the ship was resting tail down on
the bottom; he turned it slightly to one side and opened the drive by
a bare fraction. Water churned below them and the ship moved logily
sideways, toward the shore. He wondered whether he had enough power
coming from the motor to cut up a stream of bubbles and steam, hoping
that the cooling water would kill the rising turbulence so as to
conceal his operation.
He spent an hour testing and trying the depth along the shore until
he found a place that was just deep enough to let the Lancaster stand
upright with its dome a foot or two below the surface.
A small fish goggled at the shining metal hungrily.