! We're almost exactly thirty
kilometers from its center, or about ten kilometers from its surface!
But, because of it's great mass, our orbital velocity is something
terrific!

"We're going around that thing better than three hundred times every
second; our 'year' is three milliseconds long! Our orbital velocity is
_seven hundred thousand kilometers per second_!

"We're moving along at about a fifth of the speed of light!"

"Are we safe in this orbit?" Fuller asked.

"Safe enough," said Arcot bitterly. "So damned safe that I don't see how
we'll ever break free. We can't pull away with all the power on this
ship. We're trapped!

"Well, I'm worn out from working under all that gravity; let's eat and
get some sleep."

"I don't feel like sleeping," said Fuller. "You may call this safe, but
it would only take an instant to fall down to the surface of that thing
there." He looked down at their inert, but titanically powerful enemy
whose baleful glow seemed even now to be burning their funeral pyre.

"Well," said Arcot, "falling into it and flying off into space are two
things you don't have to worry about. If we started toward it, we'd be
falling, and our velocity would increase; as a result, we'd bounce right
back out again. The magnitude of the force required to make us fall into
that sun is appalling! The gravitational pull on us now amounts to about
five _billion_ tons, which is equalized by the centrifugal force of our
orbital velocity. Any tendency to change it would be like trying to bend
a spring with that much resistance.

"We'd require a tremendous force to make us either fall into that
star--or get away from it.

"To escape, we have to lift this ship out against gravity. That means
we'd have to lift about five million tons of mass. As we get farther
out, our weight will decrease as the gravitational attraction drops off,
but we would need such vast amounts of energy that they are beyond human
conception.

"We have burned up two tons of matter recharging the coils, and are now
using another two tons to recharge them again. We need at least four
tons to spare, and we only started out with twenty. We simply haven't
got fuel enough to break loose from this star's gravitational hold, vast
as the energy of matter is. Let's eat, and then we can sleep on the
problem."

Wade cooked a meal for them, and they ate in silence, trying to think of
some way out of their dilemma. Then they tried to sleep on the probl