ty
and Escape Velocity and such--how, on the Moon, the Escape Velocity is
much less than on Earth. And on that tiny second moon--well, my clue was
when I threw a stone into the air _and it never came back_."

Dan gulped hot coffee.

"I got off the moonlet myself then, got up to more than a mile above it
where I was free of its feeble gravity. But I was still in the same
orbit circling Earth. I'd have continued revolving as a human satellite
forever, of course, but for this emergency gadget hooked to my belt."

Dan held up the metal gun with its empty tank and needle-nose half
burned away.

"Reaction pistol. Fires hydrazine and oxidizer, ordinary jet-rocket
principle. Aiming it toward the stars, opposite earth, its reactive
blasts shoved me Earthward, thanks to Newton. I needed a speed of about
one-half mile a second. The powerful little jet gun had only my small
mass to shove in free space, without gravity or friction. That broke me
from free-fall _around_ Earth to gravity-fall _toward_ Earth.

"Then I spiraled down under gravity pull. I reached lung-filling air
density just in time, before my oxygen gave out. One more danger was
that I began heating up like a meteor due to air friction. I flung out a
prayer first, followed by my twin parachutes, designed for extreme
initial shock. They held. Slowed me to a paratrooper's drift the rest of
the way down."

"Wait," a puzzled pilot objected. "Your story doesn't hang together.
_How_ did you get off that moonlet? How did you get up there, a mile
above it, away from its gravity? There was nobody to throw _you_, like a
stone."

"I threw myself," said Dan. "First I ran as fast as I could, maybe
halfway around that moonlet, to get a good running start. And then--"

Dan Barstow's grin then was undoubtedly the biggest grin in history....

"Well, then, since the feeble gravity couldn't pull me back again, what
I really did was to _jump clear off that moon_."

Transcriber's Note:

This etext was produced from _Fantastic Universe_ March 1954.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
typographical errors have been corrected without note.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Shipwreck in the Sky, by Eando Binder

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHIPWRECK IN THE SKY ***

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