"Use it."
Johnny dictated the message of his location which we received. In his incautious excitement he ignored the secret code.
An interval passed. The ore was occulted again. No message had come from us—just Snap's routine signal in the weak infra-red, which we hoped Grantline would not get.
The men crowding Grantline's instrument room waited in tense silence. Then Grantline tried the telescope. Its current weakened the lights with the drain upon the distributors, and cooled the room with a sudden deadly chill as the Erentz insulating system slowed down.
The duty man looked suddenly frightened. "You'll bulge out our walls, Commander. The internal pressure—"
"We'll chance it."
They picked up the image of the Planetara! It came from the telescope and shone clear on the grid—the segment of star-field with a tiny, cigar-shaped blob. Clear enough to be unmistakable. The Planetara! Here now over the Moon, almost directly overhead, poised at what the altimeter scale showed to be a fraction under thirty thousand miles.
The men gazed in awed silence. The Planetara coming....
But the altimeter needle was motionless. The Planetara was hanging poised.
A sudden gasp went about the room. The men stood with whitening faces, gazing at the Planetara's image. And at the altimeter needle. It was moving. The Planetara was descending. But not with an orderly swoop.