Scavengers could not be said to be the type that took kindly to discipline. It was a grumbling, growling, muttering group that set about disassembling the jets of the ships that yet remained intact, carrying them to the tail end of the planetoid, grubbing them into position, and stringing the leads along the surface.
It was almost twenty-four hours before one of them looked into the sky and said, “Holy jeepers!” followed by something less printable.
His neighbor looked and said, “I’ll be damned!”
Once they noticed, all did. It became the most astonishing fact in the Universe.
“Look at the Shadow!”
It was spreading across the sky like an infected wound. Men looked at it, found it had doubled its size, wondered why they hadn’t noticed that sooner.
Work came to a virtual halt. They besieged Ted Long.
He said, “We can’t leave. We don’t have the fuel to see us back to Mars and we don’t have the equipment to capture another planetoid. So we’ve got to stay. Now the Shadow is creeping in on us because our blasting has thrown us out of orbit. We’ve got to change that by continuing the blasting. Since we can’t blast the front end any more without endangering the ship we’re building, let’s try another way.”
They went back to work on the jets with a furious energy that received impetus every half hour when the Shadow rose again over the horizon, bigger and more menacing than before.
Long had no assurance that it would work. Even if the jets would respond to the distant controls, even if the supply of water, which depended upon a storage chamber opening directly into the icy body of the planetoid, with built-in heat projectors steaming the propulsive fluid directly into the driving cells, were adequate, there was still no certainty that the body of the planetoid without a magnetic cable sheathing would hold together under the enormously disruptive stresses.