Chapter III

Sixty-five million miles out beyond the huge red ball of Centauri VI the small space ship suddenly dropped into normal space. It pitched drunkenly, every separate member of its construction squealing in protest. Pell realized they were all too close to mass, but it couldn't be helped.

At 600 miles per second the ship hurtled toward Centaura, steadily eating up the distance. He cut the converter and every other power source in the ship except the detector sensitives which he fastened to his wrists. On DIC radar the little Mark III would be a black speck, unnoticeable against the huge disc of Centauri VI, and the backlash of enemy radiation detectors combined with their Heisenberg Factors ruled that method out unless their ships were within a range of 500,000 miles.

The pale glow of the Alpha Centauri sun shed a dim illumination about the control room. Pell turned to Gret and grinned recklessly at her. "You'll have to put up with 72 hours of this--then the fun begins."

The slight motion of his head propelled his weightless body out of the shock chair in which he had been sprawled. He instinctively extended his arm to stop his upward motion and touched Gret's hand. He pulled it slightly and she rose gently from the chair and into his arms.

There was warmth in her lips, but even more in her kisses.

The detector sensitives fastened to Pell's wrists had been twinging more frequently and more painfully. They were less than five million miles from their goal--only three hours from the blue-green disc that blossomed and expanded even as they watched it in the screen.

"Better put on your shock suit, Gret. We've come as far as it is safe--we've got to decelerate now," he said.

Grunting with annoyance, he tried to shrug himself into the weightless garment which slithered about in his grasp. He flipped on the suit's power and sighed with satisfaction at the gentle kneading of the massagers. He clipped his liquid-cushioned eye-stops in place and squeezed into his seat, putting on the helmet.

"Ready now, Pell," Gret's voice came out over the inter-com.

Pell grunted and began to wind up the converter. Somewhere deep in the ship's bowels it began to sing up the scale as the starter electros were clutched in. His detector began to clack and clatter busily as its relays responded to the impact of DIC radar which converged on the ship. Pell smiled mirthlessly as he fed full converter thrust to the braking jets and waited expectantly for the detector to give him the alarm.

It did so--soon.

The red warning lights flickered and the alarm clamored intermittently up and down the scale. They had his position and orbit now.

The minutes of waiting piled up with agonizing slowness. Pell turned down the sensitives of the detector. Its constant shrilling assaulted his ear-drums painfully. Steadily he fed braking thrust to the forward jets until the needle stood at a body-battering 19 G's. He turned up the oxygen flow in his helmet with a flexing of his cheek muscles. His backbone felt as if it were in imminent danger of being forced through his body and blackness hung just off the edges of his vision.

Somewhere out there in that star-studded blackness was the enemy. The main body was not in detector range yet, but it was there, nevertheless. Jockeying into position, warming up their blasters, swinging turrets to hair-line accuracy and waiting ... waiting....

His detector clattered determinedly now. Pell glanced at it. A brief smile flitted over his hard, tensed features. At least two were out of range.

Experimentally he flicked his blaster switch and was pleased with the deadly cones of blue radiance which flickered from the gun snouts.

_There! And there!_ Converging above and below the nose of his ship were swarms of deadly little two-man Mark IX's. Dimly he could make out in the detector screen the deadly blue lattice-work of blaster beams that awaited him.

Under this pressure his mind worked like a machine with the speed of light, analyzing, rejecting, planning, replanning.... As they blew up in size with fantastic speed on the screen, Pell acted like lightning. In a blurring motion he cut the converter, fell free for an instant, wound up the converter to the aft jets and thrust up--up, and suddenly out of range.

But the enemy had anticipated his move. As he eased the thrust from the aft jets, two points of light twinkled and blossomed in the duration of a single heart-beat into his screen. A pair of DIC fighters! And they had him like a cold pigeon!

* * * * *

For one brief instant Pell was paralyzed and that was long enough for the enemy. The whistling _whoosh_ of air escaping through a rent in the hull died away as the automatic self-sealers went into action, but it gave vivid testimony of the enemy's aim.

Reacting like a coiled spring, Pell jabbed his blaster switch, catching one of the DIC fighters squarely in his sights. It seemed to fall to pieces in the midst of the minor nova of its own disintegration. The second enemy fighter flashed past like a bullet, but not before Pell chewed off half its aft jets with his blasters.

For a moment he was in the clear. Quickly he examined the function dials; found to his dismay that his aft jets were nothing more than slag now, with all the tube connections severed.

"What ... what happened?" Gret gasped.

"We've been in a fight, baby, and we got a black eye," Pell cracked. "But don't worry--I'll set this can down in spite of those missing jets."

He bent over his instruments again, a furrow slowly forming between his brows. That fight had taken time--too much valuable time. He had just two hours to decelerate from the tremendous velocity of the ship to the comparative slow velocity of Centauri V.

Discarding the last of his caution, he crammed all the braking thrust possible on the ancient converter. Up--up went the gravity needle; up past the red line at 23 G's; up past a heart-wracking 27 G's; up to an inconceivable thirty gravities where it quivered sluggishly.

Pell's body weighed over two and a half tons! His eyes weighed five pounds each and thrust agonizingly against their liquid cushion transparent stops. The converter screamed its super-sonic thunder, setting the separate members of the ship's body to vibrating madly. Every moment was red-hazed agony of an eon's duration; every second a year of exquisite pain.

The blue-green disc of Centauri V expanded visibly in the screen. Even through the observation shield Pell could make out its crescent. The brake jets were doing their work--but it would be a near thing--a very near thing. Pell prayed that there would be no more fighters; aside from the fact that he couldn't maneuver, he could still less afford to lose the time.

When the ball of Centaura puffed over all the screen and its edges were no longer visible, Pell broadcast the prearranged signal of recognition to the planet-mounted blaster batteries below. Scrambled almost beyond analysis and recognition, the acknowledging signal came back.

Suddenly Pell realized that Centaura's curvature had ballooned to flatness and on the heels of that realization came the whispering, high-pitched wail of a ship travelling at high velocity in thin atmosphere. Rapidly the wail became an ear-shattering, sustained screech and the small warning lights of the hull thermometers began to glow redly.

Nose _outward_, rather than pointed _down_, Pell continued to brake the ship with all forward thrust, depending upon the planet's attraction to prevent him from hurtling off into space on a tangent and into the jaws of the DIC fleet.

Pell never remembered how many times he blacked out, nor how many revolutions of the planet he made. Shaking the ever encroaching blackness from the borders of his vision, Pell had a fleeting memory of a heavily-forested mountain flashing by beneath, followed by a fertile plateau, a river, then mountains rising ahead.

Streaking over these with a cushion of fire thrust before it, the ship hurtled at a visibly slower pace down a rocky gorge with jagged mountains on each side. Then, decelerated almost to a stop, the battered space ship seemed to poise for an instant, then turned over gently and gouged a deep furrow in the soft ground. For perhaps 400 yards it smashed through low timber and came to a halt at the brink of a small stream where the scream of rending metal finally died away.

The last thing Pell remembered was cutting out the converter.