The room slowly moved out from under him, sliding the girls across the smooth glass. He was at the controls before the ship righted itself. Sweeping the panel, he jerked every rocket into reverse.
And nothing happened. The power of his blasts was nothing against the direct pull of the Sun, this close. The ship hurtled toward its fiery mass at terrific speed.
Among the battery of instruments on the panel was a small stratometer, calibrated in seconds. Norman saw the pointer moving with the speed of the second hand on a watch. With each jump of the pointer, they fell thousands of miles. Despite the thermo-glass, heat grew in the room like a live thing. In less than three minutes, he realized, the ship would begin to melt. He sprang from the controls, bent over the long coffin-shaped box beside the galley door. His fingers were frantic thumbs as he set the dials. It wasn't merely a test of the gravitation counteractive now. The mechanism had to work or they would boil like lobsters in the steam of the very air they breathed.
Dorothy Gray stood sensibly out of the way, watching his frenzied hands switch the delicate instrument. The Venusian woman cursed softly, straightening her twisted skirt. "Wait till I see Sade again!" she said. "Ordering his men to fire when he knew I was in here—Hey!" she demanded. "Why's it getting so hot in here?"
Dorothy pointed toward the instrument panel. "See that little clock," she said, oddly observant for one of her few years. "That's a stratometer. My dad's shown 'em to me on the big passenger lines. It says we're falling mighty fast. It's getting hot in here because we're falling into the Sun."
Seconds thundered by as Norman twirled the rheostat knobs in the counteractive, fighting to bring the delicate focus of its power into play against the dread suction that was dragging them down. The thermo-glass was jet black now against the solid heat outside. With apparently a knowing hand, Dorothy set the air conditioning unit up to maximum as drops of moisture formed on the ceiling and dampened the pilot room like hot dew. The thermo-glass began to bulge slightly at its invisible seams, first in thin ridges around the ceiling, jutting out more and more as the mad heat increased. Protection against the extremes of temperature in space, it was constructed to follow these lines of expansion. But for how long?
Keren screamed, razor-edged above the electric tension in the room. "Give me a parasuit!" she cried. "Get me out of here!"
Norman's fingers played the rheostats like a piano. Suddenly an electric eye blinked red as the counteractive fell into focus on the true gravity force sector of the Sun. As he leaped to the controls, his eye caught a glimpse of the stratometer's small death-white face. They were sixty seconds from cremation....
Slowly, with nerve-tight slowness, he turned the brake wheel a fraction of an inch as the hand of the clock moved on. The room was dim, the panel lights casting weird shadows along the black ridges in the seams of the thermo-glass. The ridges jutted inward over an inch now, spaced two feet apart like braces or rafters around the room.
Suddenly Keren threw herself upon Norman, locked her arms around his neck, dragging his sweaty hands from the wheel. "Stop us!" she whimpered hoarsely. "Stop us, handsome! I don't want to die!"