As Jan came to himself, his first sensation was a dizzy feeling in his
head, and the oppressive warmth within the space flyer. He gathered
his scattered wits together. Hadn't the crash come yet? It couldn't be
possible that the meteor had missed the great planet for which it had
been headed so squarely. He looked about him in a confused manner, not
quite brought to his entire senses. His brain was still hazy, and he
felt greatly exhausted as his wandering eyes fell upon the dial board.
It was registering top speed!
With great effort, he painfully drew himself towards the brown glass
window and looked out--into the intense darkness of space in which were
set myriads of scintillating stars. He looked on the other side for
the death's head meteor, but it was gone. All that remained of it was
a chunk about three feet thick and as long, around which the wreckage
of the twisted grapples lay entwined. Above the meteoric fragment, the
three drills still churned, one of them broken in half. Jan looked
behind him, and out of the window he could discern a small red blot,
Mars, far to the rear, and growing smaller.
For a moment he could not understand the miracle which had occurred.
Then gradually it dawned upon him that he had been grasped from the
jaws of death just in time. The presence of the meteor's chunk and the
oppressive heat within the space car gave testimony of his deliverance
before entering the atmosphere of Mars.
The space car containing the unconscious young astronaut had whirled
off through the outer layer of Martian atmosphere and into the coldness
of space once more. This accounted for the suffocating heat inside the
flyer where the intense friction from the thin, rarefied air had heated
the space ship. He must have penetrated it at a terrible speed on his
outward flight. He had been unconscious for a bare five minutes, and
already he was nearly fifty thousand miles from Mars. He started the
air rejuvenator to clear the hot, stuffy interior of the craft, after
which he turned the flyer and headed back for Mars.
In the radio receiving station on the Earth, the big glass bulb set in
the wall above the operator's head suddenly flashed, and an electric
spark snapped and crackled as it closed the gap between two metal
cylinders. The operator mechanically adjusted the dials and switches,
and the cylinder containing the aluminum sheet began turning, filling
the room with its droning noise. As the bulb grew dark once more, and
the roller came to a stop, the aluminum sheet cleaved from off the
roller and fell to the desk before the operator.
Before placing it upon the transmitter plate and pressing the button
marked "Meteorological Bureau," the silver-capped operator reviewed the
message curiously. It was the report of one of the astronauts employed
by the government Bureau of Meteorology, Jan Trenton by name. It seemed
that he was stopping over at Mars while his ship underwent certain
repairs, and that he would report for further duty the next day.
Such is the life of an astronaut.