An alien ship, all right!
“Thr—” His foot touched the bolt-release pedal.
And then the Outsider had swerved suddenly and was off the crosshairs. Carson punched keys frantically, to follow.
For a tenth of a second, it was out of the visiplate entirely, and then as the nose of his scouter swung after it, he saw it again, diving straight towards the ground.
The ground?
It was an optical illusion of some sort. It had to be: that planet—or whatever it was—that now covered the visiplate couldn’t be there. Couldn’t possibly! There wasn’t any planet nearer than Neptune three billion miles away—with Pluto on the opposite side of the distant pinpoint sun.
His detectors! They hadn’t shown any object of planetary dimensions, even of asteroid dimensions, and still didn’t.
It couldn’t be there, that whatever-it-was he was diving into, only a few hundred miles below him.
In his sudden anxiety to keep from crashing, he forgot the Outsider ship. He fired the front breaking rockets, and even as the sudden change of speed slammed him forward against the seat straps, fired full right for an emergency turn. Pushed them down and held them down, knowing that he needed everything the ship had to keep from crashing and that a turn that sudden would black him out for a moment.
It did black him out.