The face was gone from the sky now. Only the Moon remained, the Moon and the brush-stroke mountains far below.
Then, suddenly, the speed was slowing and the ship glided downward, down into the saw-teeth of the mountains.
"We're falling!" yelled Max, and Chizzy growled at him.
But they weren't falling. The ship leveled off and floated, suspended above a sprawling laboratory upon a mountain top.
"That's Manning's laboratory," whispered Pete in terror-stricken tones.
The levers yielded unexpectedly. Chizzy flung the power control over, drove the power of the accumulator bank, all the reserve, into the engines. The ship lurched, but did not move. The engines whined and screamed in torture. The cabin's interior was filled with a blast of heat, the choking odor of smoke and hot rubber. The heavy girders of the frame creaked under the mighty forward thrust of the engines ... but the ship stood still, frozen above that laboratory in the hills.
Chizzy, hauling back the lever, turned around, pale. His hand began clawing for his heat gun. Then he staggered back. For there were only two men in the cabin with him—Reg and Max. Pete had gone!
"He just disappeared," Max jabbered. "He was standing there in front of us. Then all at once he seemed to fade, as if he was turning into smoke. Then he was gone."
Something had descended about Pete. There was no sound, no light, no heat. He had no sense of weight. It was as if, suddenly, his mind had become disembodied.