He eased himself into the control seat and started to shift them into the proper curve for landing. Fascinated, the three stared out the large port at the rapidly increasing globe before them. Unbroken in surface, it loomed before, a seemingly fantastic and impossible thing, a perfect sphere.
Slowly, prodigiously slow, they approached, coasting gracefully, for inertia or no, there was still the great mass of the ship to take into consideration. There was something wrong about this—somewhere—then, suddenly, the same thought struck all three of them.
“It isn’t a sphere!” voiced Nick. “It just looks that way because of its tremendous speed of rotation!”
Dorothy wheeled out the z-special camera and turned on the power, let it operate for a full minute. Quietly they waited for the automatic developing process, then cut the lights and flashed a projection on the panel in the rear of the room which was ideally suitable for a motion-picture screen. Eyes glued on the meters, Dorothy adapted the flow of film until the images of the planetoid on the panel corresponded to what they saw outside.
“What’s the period of rotation?”
“100 per minute. That, to put it mildly, is fast. It must be extremely dense to hang together at all—and even then, made of ultracohesive matter.”
As Joe put it some time later, the business of landing on Hastur (as the planetoid came to be known, Marquis first dubbed it that after some legendary, elemental wind-being; they found out later that Hastur wasn’t really the being Fred had in mind, but it stuck nonetheless) was roughly analogous to that of a fly lighting on a spinning top. There was Hastur looming before them in the deeps of space, gleaming like phosphor on black velvet, the pseudosphere of it slowly swelling before their eyes. And there was the Columbia, a great overgrown cylinder with a turret in the middle—a turret that completely encircled her, because she spun, too,—albeit slowly in comparison to the planetoid—gently curving in to try to light upon the little world’s surface.
What happened? They should have known, but they didn’t. The Columbia swooped down upon Hastur, like the proverbial falcon upon its prey. Only it wasn’t as simple as that, because the ship touched the outer fringe of that terrifically-accelerated rotating atmosphere and bounced off, ricocheted much like a smooth stone splatting across the surface of water.
They weren’t ready for that splat. It took them unaware and tumbled them all head-over. Luck was with them and no one slammed into anything sharp or deadly hard. Dorothy nursed Nick’s bloody nose and a cut over Marquis’ eye which just missed being serious.