probably
those taken from prisoners.

The Planeteers were loaded down with equipment. A few Connie prisoners
carried equipment, too.

Trudeau had the rocket launcher and the remaining rockets. Kemp had his
torch and two tanks of oxygen. Bradshaw had tied his safety line to the
squat containers of chemical fuel for the torch and was towing them
behind like strange balloons. The only trouble with that system, Rip
thought, was that Bradshaw could stop, but the fuel would have a tendency
to keep going. Unless the Englishman was skillful, his burden would drag
him off his feet.

Dominico had a tube of rocket fuel under each arm. The Italian was small,
and the tubes were bulky. Each was about ten feet long and two feet in
diameter. With any gravity or air resistance at all, the Italian couldn't
have carried even one.

Santos took the radiation detection instruments and the case with the
astrogation equipment from Koa. Rip greeted his men briefly, then took
his computing board and began figuring. He knew the men were glad he and
Santos had made it. But they kept their greetings short. A spinning
asteroid was no place for long and sentimental speeches.

He remembered the dimensions of the asteroid and its mass. He computed
its inertia, then figured out what it would take to overcome the inertia
of the spin.

The mathematics would have been simpler under normal conditions, but
doing them on the run, trying to watch his step at the same time, made
things a little complicated. He had to hold the board under his arm, run
alongside Santos while the new sergeant held the case open, select the
book he wanted, open it and try to read the tables by his belt light, and
then transfer the data to the board.

His ventilator had quieted down once he got into the darkness, but now it
started whining slightly again because he was sweating profusely. Finally
he figured out the thrust needed to stop the spin. Now all he had to do
was compute how much fuel it would take.

He had figures on the amount of thrust given by the kind of rocket fuel
in the tubes. He also knew how much fuel each tube contained. But the
figures were not in his head. They were on reference sheets.

He collected the data on the fly, slowing down now and then to read
something, until a yell from Santos or Koa warned that the sun line was
creeping close. When he had all data noted on the board, he started his
mathematics. He was right in the middle of a laborious e