Adam Dinar’s voice came crisp from the bulkhead speaker:
“Generators ready, sir, at full power.”
John Star’s brief, grim smile at the “sir” was checked again, by sharp mistrust.
Swiftly he estimated the position of the bar on the river, planning the thing he meant to do.
For the slightest error, he realized, meant instant annihilation.
Fingers on the keys, he peered back into the tele-periscope.
He remembered the air-lock, then, and touched the button that closed it.
That act, he knew, might betray them.
But if he had left it open, mere air-resistance would have torn it away.
Tensely he waited, one second, two, and three, for the motors to work.
A long, slender black cone projected abruptly from the huge black sphere of the flier’s belly.
It swung toward them.
A weapon!
Four!
Five!
He heard the clang of the closing valve and touched a key.
The tower platform and the black flier vanished instantaneously.
Yet, since that unimaginable force was applied equally to the entire ship, there had been no perceptible shock; the geodynes had flung them away with a rapidity incalculable—and perilous!
Dim crimson gloom spun about them.
A black shadow met them.
Driven with lightning speed to meet this desperate emergency, John Star’s fingers leaped across the keys.
Years of training now found their test.
He had often imagined, in the days at the Academy, that such a thing might be done, half longing for the chance to try it, yet half fearful that the chance might come.
After the merest instant of acceleration, he reversed the geodynes for another split second, to check an inconceivable velocity.
And the Purple Dream, a moment before upon the black wall, was plunging down toward the flat yellow river, still at a frightful speed, her hull incandescent from friction with the air.
Desperately, he flung down the rocket firing keys, to check the remaining momentum before they struck.
A desperate game, this playing with the curvature of space itself, in the very atmosphere of a planet.
Human daring and human skill, pitted against titanic forces.
Savage elation filled him.
He was winning—if the rockets stopped them in time!
Down on a dark sand bar hurtled the incandescent ship.
Down to the bank of a freezing river.
Rockets thundering at full power to the last moment, she struck the sand heavily; she plowed into it, steam mantling her red-hot hull.
By the narrowest margin—safe!
Safe, at any rate, until the Medusae had time to strike.
Hot valves flung open.
Four passengers came aboard.
Half-naked, haggard passengers, dead-weary, stiff with cold.
The air-lock clanged behind them; the Purple Dream thundered away again, blue blasts licking black sand.
Geodynes cut in at once, she plowed with an utterly reckless velocity upward through the dim red afterglow.
John Star felt a moment of wild triumph, before he recalled the belt of fortress satellites ahead; recalled the six light years of interstellar space beyond; remembered the fleets of the Medusas, guarding the System, and the occupation force waiting in their new black citadel on the Moon.
Behind, he saw huge machines stirring along the walls and towers of that nightmare metropolis.
A full score of the spider-ships lifted on jets of green fire, to pursue.
More than a match for the Purple Dream in speed, armed with those weapons that fired suns of annihilating atomic flame!
27 The Joke on Man
The red murk above grew thin.
The Purple Dream burst upward into the freedom of space, where her incandescent hull could cool.
The planet drew away beneath them, a huge and featureless half-moon of dull and baleful orange-red.
Up from it followed the swarm of spider-ships.
The recklessly sudden start of the cruiser had left them too far behind to use their fearful weapons at once. But swiftly they closed the gap.