“I hadn’t gotten curious then,” responded Ken.
The conversation lapsed for a while, as Feth Allmer slowly spun the verniers controlling the direction of thrust from the torpedo’s drivers. The machine was, as Ken had said, cutting around into the shadow of the big planet, still with a relative speed of several miles per second to overcome. Allmer was navigating with the aid of a response-timer and directional loop in the relay station, whose readings were being reproduced on his own board; the torpedo was still too far from Earth for its reflection altimeter to be effective. For some minutes Ken watched silently, interpreting as best he could the motions of the flickering needles and deft tentacles. A grunt of satisfaction from the operator finally told him more clearly than the instruments that the beam had been reached; a snaky. arm promptly twisted one of the verniers as far as it would go.
“I don’t see why they couldn’t power these things for decent acceleration,” Feth’s voice came in an undertone. “How much do you want to bet that we don’t run all the way through the beam before I can match the planet’s rotation? With nine-tenths of their space free for drivers and accumulators, you’d think they could pile up speed even without overdrive. These cheap—” his voice trailed off again. Ken made no reply, not being sure whether one was expected. Anyway, Allmer was too bright for his utterances to be spontaneous, and any answer should be carefully considered purely from motives of caution.
Apparently the mechanic had been unduly pessimistic; for in a matter of minutes he had succeeded in fighting the torpedo into a vertical descent. Even Ken was able to read this from the indicators; and before long the reflection altimeter began to register. This device was effective at a distance equal to Sarr’s diameter — a trifle over six thousand miles — and Ken settled himself beside the operator as soon as he noted its reaction. There was not far to go.
His own particular bank of instruments, installed on a makeshift panel of their own by Allmer, were still idle. The pressures indicated zero, and the temperatures were low — even the sodium had frozen, apparently. There had been little change for many hours — apparently the whole projectile was nearly in radiative equilibrium with the distant sun. Ken watched tensely as the altimeter reading dropped, wondering slightly whether atmosphere would first make itself apparent through temperature or pressure readings.
As a matter of fact, he did not find out. Feth reported pressure first, before any of Ken’s indicators had responded; and the investigator remembered that the door was shut. It had leaked before, of course, but that had been under a considerably greater pressure differential; apparently the space around the door was fairly tight, even at the temperature now indicated.
“Open the cargo door, please,” Ken responded to the report. “We might as well find out if anything is going to react spontaneously.”
“Just a minute; I’m still descending pretty fast. If the air is very dense, I could tear the doors off at this speed.”
“Can’t you decelerate faster?”
“Yes, now. Just a moment. I didn’t want to take all night on the drop, but there’s only about twenty miles to go now. You’re the boss from here in.” The needle of the altimeter obediently slowed in its march around the dial. Ken began warming up the titanium sample — it had the highest meeting point of all. In addition, he was reasonably sure that there would be free nitrogen in the atmosphere; and at least one of the tests ought to work.