here 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 space. Over this shadowed portion a faint, unearthly glow clung close, the result of the terrific friction of the ascent. In miniature, in the regular screens, was Satellite III, but a distorted miniature, for its half-face appeared concave in shape, and dusted with the haze of its atmosphere.
he Hawk was visibly relieved. He turned to the silent Ku Sui.
"I must congratulate you, Dr. Ku," he said, "on the operation of the asteroid. It's as smooth as any ship. And now, your cigarro. Ban, have you one?"