going through. It would be a shame if it was all useless in the end. Shame? It’d be a lot more than that. Bob could remember the way the blue balls of lightning had exploded inside the ships of Wing Nine.
They seemed about to make it, though. The three pips were going down on the screen again, and the Icarius was reaching some sort of balance that didn’t take constant juggling with the steering jets. If the ships didn’t spot them for a few seconds more they might have a chance.
“Find me some kind of rough valley down there,” Simon gasped. “Just big enough to bury us in. I’ll set her down in anything, if you can spot a good cover.”
The little telescreen showed a wild jumble under them, but nothing in which they could hide.
Bob seemed to remember one big crevasse visible before they first landed and which would do, but he couldn’t spot it.
Then another grunt from Jakes snapped his eyes back to the radar screen. It was too late.
The black ships must have spotted them, since they were now heading straight toward the Icarius, though without the impossible speeds of which they were capable.
They didn’t need to rush. The three inside the little ship were sitting ducks for them.
CHAPTER 11
Bound for Planet X
“ONLY ONE CHANCE,” Simon gasped. The strain of trying to maneuver under such an acceleration pressure was telling on him. But his hands were still in complete mastery of the controls.
He flipped the ship further over, using the full strength of the steering jets, and went skimming over the little moon, forcing the Icarius into a power curve that shot her out of the sight of the three ships. There would, however, be no time for a careful landing before they caught up. Bob couldn’t see any chance.
Simon’s eyes were glued to the screen, though, and he was cutting almost entirely around the moon. It required a constant turning with the steering rockets to swing the main jet off course enough to keep the circle going.
Ahead of them, the mock-up ship suddenly appeared. Simon headed straight for it. As it came near, he forced the Icarius down until she was almost skimming the ground, and began braking furiously. The mock-up swelled in the screen—and behind it lay a mass of ugly boulders. Bob ducked instinctively—or tried to; the pressure in the cushion kept him from doing more than nodding his head.
Something flipped across the observation port. There was a simultaneous blast from the braking rockets, and the Icarius gave a screech as her bottom scraped rock. Then she was still.
They were inside the mock-up, placed there almost as if Simon had been a hand and the ship a ball to be dropped into a pocket. Bob sighed, and almost relaxed. It was logical—and the last thing in the world he would have thought of doing. But it was the only really good cover on the whole moon—and perhaps the last place where the aliens would look for them.
Now some of Simon’s cockiness came back. “How was that for a landing, boy? Did the Academy make or not make a mistake?”
“Maybe they did,” Bob had to admit. “I don’t care. What I want to know is how we’re going to get out.”
“No trouble, I think. That stuff stuck to metal, but it didn’t seem to bother anything else. And the Icarius has a porcelain glaze all over her. Anyhow, I don’t think the stuff is tough enough to worry a set of hydrogen rockets.”
Bob shook his head. “I didn’t mean that. I mean that we may not be found here, but we still are no nearer getting back to Outpost than before. We can’t stay here forever.”
“We can stay for a month at least,” Simon told him. “I keep her pretty well stocked. Juan, you’re pretty good at heating things. Want to fix up a lunch?”
Juan got out of his seat, still looking worried, and began opening lockers and taking out whatever struck his fancy. Most of the cans were of the type which heated the food automatically when a button on top was pressed, and then popped open when it was ready.
He selected three of these, and three bulbs of cold tea. Eating here would be easier than in no gravity, but not too much.
The chief trouble with their hide-out, Bob decided, was that they couldn’t look out. The blast of the braking rockets had apparently blown the tough fabric up as the ship went through, and it had settled back again. The best plastic fabrics known to men would have been completely consumed, but this stuff seemed to have almost unlimited tolerance to heat, cold, pressure and almost everything else. They were walled in thoroughly.
Reaction set in as he realized they might actually be safe for a while. His hands shook as he took the warm can from Juan, and he noticed that Simon could hardly hold his. But that could be partly sheer physical strain. Operating those controls as he had done against top acceleration pressure must have strained bis muscles to the limit.
“They’ll hardly hang around a month so near Outpost,” Bob decided finally. “If we can stick it out without being found for a few hours, they’ll probably go away.”
“Yeah.” Simon had given up trying to control his muscles. He had found a lever that wasn’t present on regulation acceleration chairs and pressed it, to let his seat slope back. Now he half lay on it, sipping at the tea and trying to relax.
“Yeah,” he repeated. “If we last a few hours, we’ll be all right, I guess. I wish I knew where those aliens are right now.”
“You could try the radar,” Juan suggested. “It should go through this cloth, should it not?”
“It might. But I don’t know whether they can detect it or not. Better leave it off.” Simon rolled over and bent his face down, trying to line up the port and his eye in such a way that he could see through the faint slit near the bottom of the mock-up they were in. He gave up.
The inability to see what was going on began to get on their nerves sooner than Bob would have expected. They knew that the black ships were probably somewhere around, and they suspected that the aliens might have ways of detecting them of which they knew nothing. But they couldn’t be sure.
Finally, Jakes got up and began straightening up the slight mess their eating had made.
Juan started to help, but Simon shook his head. “We’d better stay in our seats. If we have to take off, it’ll be pretty sudden.”
“You can’t take off,” Bob told him. “You’d run smack into those boulders ahead.”
Jakes frowned and nodded slowly. “Hey, that’s right. I forgot all about them. We’d better swing the Icarius around, and do it quick. Shouldn’t be too heavy here.”
That seemed to be the only answer, and they got into their space suits again, which seemed to be a regular job on this moon. Outside, they saw that there was plenty of room for the maneuver under the tent-like dome. And the whole ship shouldn’t weigh enough on this moon to bother them.
But the force of inertia was as strong as ever. Here, a man could probably lift a thousand pounds with his little finger. But he couldn’t have jerked it up, any more than on Earth. The old law that things resist change of motion with a force proportional to their mass—not merely their weight—still applied. The Icarius had a motion of zero, and changing it to anything else took a lot of work and effort. Even with the light weight, there was also some friction working against them—and almost none in their favor to hold them down.
Bob finally solved it by fastening a line to the ship and having the three brace themselves against one of the slim metal supports for the mock-up. It took minutes of straining at the cord to get the ship into a slow motion, barely visible to their eyes, but it did begin turning.
And at least there was no sign outside, as there would have been if they’d slewed her around with the steering jets.
Once in motion, it wasn’t hard to overcome friction here enough to keep her turning. But at the end, it proved equally hard to stop the ship, and a long process of trial and error was needed to get her lined up to suit Simon Jakes.
This tune, they were all sweating from honest labor. Juan started back inside, but Simon and Bob both had the same idea. They flopped down on their stomachs and began peering out under the slit at the bottom of the
