The Hawk closed the face-plate of his helmet and rapidly spun over the controls. Another hiss, and the outer door moved wide. He stepped with force into space.
he panorama below him was breath-taking: Earth seemed almost to hit him in the face. He had not realized it was so close. The sheer, mighty stretch of the globe filled his eyes, and for seconds he could not focus on anything else, so overwhelming to his vision was the colossal map. It reached away to left and right, before and behind, and he was so near that it seemed almost flat, a sun-gleaming plain on which stood out in sharp outline the continent of Europe, the Atlantic Ocean and, bordering it, the edge of North America.
To his left was the flaming orb of the sun; and directly underfoot, rotating against the vast background of the North Atlantic, he now saw the asteroid, glinting metallically along its craggy length as it swung over. Carse centered every bit of power he had on it, and at maximum acceleration began to overhaul his objective.
The asteroid was plunging free to Earth, and the rate of its uncontrolled plunge was second by second mounting tremendously; but Carse's power-fall quickly enabled him to overtake it. As the dome swooped up in front of him, and the sunlight washed briefly over its desolate buildings, he looked hard for a shape moving amongst them, without success. Doubtless the Eurasian was well inside by now.
The job of getting into the dome was a hazardous one. About every thirty seconds the asteroid described a complete rotation, making the rim turn at a speed of half a mile a second, and that made the task of entering extremely dangerous to a man whose only protection was the metal and fabric of a space-suit. Misjudgment would either rip the suit or dash him to instant death. He had to slip cleanly down through the jagged tear in the dome, planning his swoop accurately to the fraction of a second.
Never cooler, the Hawk made it. Building a parallel speed equal to that of the rotating dome, he followed it over in a dizzy whirl; and as the rent came below he shot curving down and in with sufficient precision, and at once swiftly adjusted his gravity to offset the asteroid's great centrifugal force.
