The deck of the control room began to throb with the power of the huge ionized particle engines. On the screen the traction line began to straighten between the two ships. Its still slack loop twisted like a dying snake between the forces that played over it. Then it tautened.
"It's moving toward us," Skip said aloud. No one answered him. Their eyes were too tightly fixed to the screens.
Suddenly the Cerebus III began to whip right and left. Stevens roughly pushed the pilot from his seat and made some quick moves on the controls. The yawing stopped, but when they looked at the screens, the Regis was once more at a distance, and the traction line was slack.
Stevens looked at the menacing sides of the sunspot. Actually there were no real sides—they were like the sides of a tornado in a mass of air. Here in the interior of the spot, their main problem was to balance the ship against the force of the rising column of gases from the mouth of the spot inside the sun's photosphere, and to adjust their position to the constantly downward drift of the Regis. There was a maximum distance that they could afford to let the Regis drift downward if they wished to save her. Now that they were close to the photosphere, the drag of the sun's 27 G's was greater than it had been out at 10,000 miles. If they managed to pull the Regis close enough for a transfer, it would have to be in the next hour.
"We'll have to take a chance," Stevens said.
Once more he called the engine room. "Throw them in full when I say go," he instructed.
Bull looked at Skip. He smiled and it didn't take words for his thoughts to become clear. Now you will see some real power from a good ship.
"Let her go."
The deck leaped to life, reacting to the blows of countless millions of quanta of light as free electrons attached themselves to the stripped nuclei in the discharge chambers of the ship's engines.