Once they noticed, all did. It became the most astomshmg fact m the Universe.
‘Look at the Shadow!’
It was spreading across the sky like an infected wound. Men looked at it, found it had doubled its size, wondered why they hadn’t noticed that sooner.
Work came to a virtual halt. They besieged Tod Long.
He said, ‘We can’t lea;ve. We don’t have the fuel to see us b ck to Mars and we don’t have the equipment to capture another planetoid. So we’ve got to stay. Now the Shadow is creeping in on us because our blasting has thrown us out of orbit. We’ve got to change that by co tmuing the blasting. Since we can’t blast the front end any more without endangering the ship we’re building, let’s try another way.’
They went back to work on the jets with a furious energy that received impetus every half hour when the Shadow rose again over the horizon, bigger and more menacing than before.
Long had no assurance that it would work. Even if the jets would respond to the distant controls, even if the supply of water, which depended upon a storage chamber opening directly into the icy body of the planetoid, with built-in heat projectors steaming the propulsive fluid directly into the driving cells, were adequate, there was still no certainty that the body of the planetoid without a magnetic cable sheathing would hold together under the enormously disruptive stresses.
‘Ready!’ came the signal in Long’s receiver.
Long called, ‘Ready!’ and depressed the contact.
The vibration grew about him. The star field in the visiplate trembled.
In the rearview, there was a distant gleaming spume of swiftly moving ice crystals.
‘It’s blowing!’ was the cry.
It kept on blowing. Long dared not stop. For six hours, it blew, hissing, bubbling, steaming into space; the body of the planetoid converted to vapor and hurled away.
The Shadow came closer until men did nothing but stare at the mountain in the sky, surpassing Saturn itself in spectacularity. Its every groove and valley was a plain scar upon its face. But when it passed through the planetoid’s orbit, it crossed more than half a mile behind its then position.
The steam jet ceased.
Long bent in his seat and covered his eyes. He hadn’t eaten in two days. He could eat now, though. Not another planetoid was close enough to interrupt them, even if it began an approach that very moment.
Back on the planetoid’s surface, Swenson said, ‘All the time I watched that damned rock coming down, I kept saying to myself, ‘This can’t happen. We can’t let it happen.’
‘Hell,’ said Rioz, ‘we were all nervous. Did you see Jim Davis? He was green. I was a little jumpy myself.’
‘That’s not it. It wasn’t just – dying, you know. I was thinking – I know it’s funny, but I can’t help it – I was thinking that Dora warned me I’d get myself killed, she’ll never let me hear the last of it. Isn’t that a crummy sort of attitude at a time like that?’
‘Listen,’ said Rioz, ‘you wanted to get married, so you got married. Why come to me with your troubles?’
10
The flotilla, welded into a single unit, was returning over its mighty course from Saturn to Mars. Each day it flashed over a length of space it had taken nine days outward.
Ted Long had put the entire crew on emergency. With twenty-five ships embedded in the planetoid taken out of Saturn’s rings and unable to move or maneuver independently, the co-ordination of their power sources into unified blasts was a ticklish problem. The jarring that took place on the first day of travel nearly shook them out from under their hair.
That, at least, smoothed itself out as the velocity raced upward under the steady thrust from behind. They passed the one-hundred-thousand-mile-an-hour mark late on the second day, and climbed steadily toward the million-mile mark and beyond.
Long’s ship, which formed the needle point of the frozen fleet, was the only one which possessed a five-way view of space. It was an uncomfortable position under the circumstances. Long found himself watching tensely, imagining somehow that the stars would slowly begin to slip backward, to whizz past them, under the influence of the multi-ship’s tremendous rate of travel.
They didn’t, of course. They remained nailed to the black backdrop, their distance scorning with patient immobility any speed mere man could achieve.
The men complained bitterly after the first few days. It was not only that they were deprived of the space-float. They were burdened by much more than the ordinary pseudo-gravity field of the ships, by the effects of the fierce acceleration under which they were living. Long himself was weary to death of the relentless pressure against hydraulic cushions.
They took to shutting off the jet thrusts one hour out of every four and Long fretted.
It had been just over a year that he had last seen Mars shrinking in an observation window from this ship, which had then been an independent entity. What had happened since then? Was the colony still there?
In something like a growing panic, Long sent out radio pulses toward Mars daily, with the combined power of twenty-five ships behind it. There was no answer. He expected none. Mars and Saturn were on opposite sides of the Sun now, and until he mounted high enough above the ecliptic to get the Sun well beyond the line connecting himself and Mars, solar interference would prevent any signal from getting through.
High above the outer rim of the Asteroid Belt, they reached maximum velocity. With short spurts of power from first one side jet, then another, the huge vessel reversed itself. The composite jet in the rear began its mighty roaring once again, but now the result was deceleration.
They passed a hundred million miles over the Sun, curving down to intersect the orbit of Mars.
A week out of Mars, answering signals were heard for the first time, fragmentary, ether-tom, and incomprehensible, but they were coming from Mars. Earth and Venus were at angles sufficiently different to leave no doubt of that.
Long relaxed. There were still humans on Mars, at any rate.
Two days out of Mars, the signal was strong and clear and Sankov was at the other end.
Sankov said, ‘Hello, son. It’s three in the morning here. Seems like people have no consideration for an old man. Dragged me right out of bed.’
‘I’m sorry, sir.’
‘Don’t be. They were following orders. I’m afraid to ask, son. Anyone hurt? Maybe dead?’
‘No deaths, sir. Not one.’
‘And – and the water? Any left?’
