At three hundred miles an hour the Sandra had nicked the upper plates of the dome and streaked on, unharmed!
It was not necessary now to use infra-red glasses to see the asteroid. It was there in the visi-screen for naked eyes, but for seconds not one of the men in the ship's control-cabin thought to look. The awful acceleration and shock had dazed them. They had not known what was coming, except Friday and the Hawk, and only the latter was able to retain reasonable alertness. He, almost immediately after the impact, cut down the load on the generators, and brought the Sandra out of her mad drive forward, rotating the ship until she was facing back towards the asteroid. Then all of them looked through the bow windows, and what they saw told the story in an instant.
"It's visible! See—the invisibility's gone!" cried Friday.
score of miles away the body lay, fully revealed, its starboard half gleaming hard and sharp in the sunlight. Cautiously the Sandra drew closer. Carse gave the controls to Ban and examined it carefully through the electelscope, after removing the infra-red attachment.
He saw that the keel of the Sandra had torn a great, mangled rent in the dome and through this the air had rushed out. Space had taken possession. The disintegrating rays which had been burning at the Sandra had been snapped off with the sheathing of invisibility; in that one wild second of impact, all the asteroid's functioning mechanism had been destroyed. Lar Tantril had not thought quite far enough: he had not sealed the buildings air-tight against a possible crashing of the dome, and for that reason alone he and his men had gone down in full defeat under the drive of the Hawk.
Shreds of flotsam drifting and turning in space around the dome now became visible—bits of wreckage hurled out from the tear, and also a number of white, bloated things which once had been the bodies of men. The outrushing tide of air had taken them along, and now they drifted, shapeless, all of a kind, in the lifelessness of space.
"Merciful heaven!" whispered Eliot Leithgow, staring at the desolation. "Gone! Just snuffed out!"
The Hawk took over again and brought and held the Sandra in a position a quarter of a mile above the now rapidly falling asteroid.