“Well, you may be right, and then again. . . . The important thing, now, is to get off Hastur. These radiations are what got most of us—doesn’t make too much difference with me, because I’m old. But I’m assuming,” he looked at Dorothy and Nick, “that you two will be wanting to pair off pretty soon. And I don’t think Dorothy would care to start knitting little sweaters with holes for three heads in them after she’d had x-rays taken.”
“We’ll get off,” declared Nick. “Our rockets are powerful enough, I think. We’ll take what we can from the Orion—and I suspect that you and your book, Steve, will be all—then scram away from here fast.”
He clasped Dorothy’s hand. “I only want a hole for one head in that little sweater.”
Joe Timbie turned to Hartnett and Nick with a despairing gesture. “See? All we do is slide along the ground. I’ve given her the best blasts we have and there’s the result.”
“A good thing they’ve found a new kind of rocket fuel in these last years.”
When Dorothy came in, Nick gripped her hands and clung to her. There was no need for words. Silently they looked out of the port onto the scene of their prison, grey twilight world with its sky of starlit black.
Finally he straightened up, reached out and pressed the call-button which would summon all hands to the control room.
“There is nothing wrong with the rocket tubes, or the fuel,” he said softly when all had come. “Everything is working as it should work. Our rockets just aren’t strong enough to get us off.”
“But the contracels?” burst out Marquis bewilderedly.