ded. "Then," he said. "I most certainly
will not try. But Captain Carse, may I have a cigarro before we start
on this journey?"

Carse had gone over so the space-stick and his eyes were on the
visi-screen, but he now turned them to his old foe for a moment. "Not
just now, Dr. Ku," he said levelly. "For it might be that all but two
puffs of it would be wasted. Yes--later--if we survive these next few
minutes."

The remark did nothing to ease the tension of their leaving. Ban
Wilson could not restrain a question.

"Carse, are you going to risk atmospheric friction all the way to the
laboratory?"

"No. Haven't time for that. Up and down--up into space, then down to
the lab--high acceleration and deceleration."

He grasped the space-stick, then in neutral, holding the asteroid
motionless in the valley. He glanced at the visi-screen again, checked
over the main controls and tightened his hand on the stick.

"Ready everyone," he said, and gently moved the stick up and forward.

* * * * *

There was, to the men in the control room, little consciousness of
power unleashed: only the visi-screen and the bank of positional
instruments told what had happened with that first, delicate movement
of the space-stick. It was an experiment, a feeler. The indicators of
the positionals quivered a little and altered, and in the visi-screen
the hills of the valley, that a moment before had been quite close and
large, had diminished to purple-green mounds below.

Then the accelerating sensations began. Carse had the "feel" of the
asteroidal ship and his controlling hand grew bolder. The steady
pressure on the space-stick increased, it went up farther and farther,
and the whole mighty mass of the asteroid streaked out at a tangent
through the atmosphere of Satellite III toward the gulf beyond.

With dangerous acceleration the gigantic body rose, and from outside
there grew a moaning which was quickly a shrieking--a terrible,
maddened sound as of a Titan dying in agony--the sound of the cloven
atmosphere. Twenty miles of rock were hurled out by the firm hand on
the space-stick, and that hand only increased its driving pressure
when the screaming of the air died away in the depthless silence of
outer space.

In one special visi-screen lay mirrored the craggy back-stretch of the
asteroid, half of it clear-cut and hard in Jupiter's flood of light,
the other half lost in the encompassing blackness of spac