Then two husky pilots played the armored figures on the steel cables as an angler plays a fish, aiding the struggling drivers to overcome the velocity.
Soon the Lensmen, young and old, were inside. Doctor and nurse went instantly to work, with the calmness and precision so characteristic of their highly skilled crafts. In a trice they had him out of his armor, out of his leather, and into a hammock, perceiving at once that except for a few pads of gauze they could do nothing for their patient until they had him upon an operating table. Meanwhile the pilots, having swung the hammocks, had been observing, computing, and conferring.
"She's got a lot of speed, admiral—most of it straight down," Watson reported. "On her landing jets it'll take two G's on a full revolution to bring her in. With both of us at the controls we can balance her down, but it'll have to be on her tail and it'll mean over five G's all the way. Which do you want?"
"Which is more important, Lacy, time or pressure?" Haynes transferred decision to the surgeon.
"Time." Lacy decided instantly. "Fight her down!" His patient had been through so much already of force and pressure that a little more would not do additional hurt, and time was most decidedly of the essence.
Starkly incandescent flares ripped and raved from driving jets and side jets. The speedster spun around viciously, only to be curbed, skillfully if savagely, at the precisely right instant. Without an orbit, without even a corkscrew or other spiral, she was going down—straight down. And not upon her under jets was this descent to be, nor upon her more powerful braking jets. Those two master pilots, Prime Base's best, were going to kill the awful inertia of the speedster by "balancing her down on her tail." Or, to translate from the jargon of space, they were going to hold the tricky, cranky little vessel upright upon the terrific blasts of her driving projectors, against the Earth's gravitation and against all other perturbing forces, while her driving force counteracted, overcame, and dissipated the full frightful measure of the kinetic energy of her mass and speed!
And balance her down they did. Haynes was afraid for a while that that intrepid pair were actually going to land the speedster on her tail. They didn't—quite—but they had only a scant hundred feet to spare when they nosed her over and eased her to ground on her under jets.
The crash-wagon and its crew were waiting, and as Kinnison was rushed to the hospital the others hurried to the net room. Doctor Lacy first, of course, then the nurse; and, to Haynes' approving surprise, she took it like a veteran. Hardly had the surgeon let himself out of the "cocoon" than she was in it; and hardly had the terrific surges and recoils of her own not inconsiderable one hundred and forty-five pounds of mass abated than she herself was out and sprinting across the sward toward the hospital.