"Why spiral, Kim? Why not follow him down, huh? Our intrinsic is no worse than his—it's the same one, in fact."
"Get conscious, Hen. You haven't got a speedster under you now."
"So what? I can certainly handle this scrap heap a damn sight better than that ground-gripper is handling that speedster." Henry Henderson, Master Pilot No. 1 of the Service, was not bragging. He was merely voicing what to him was the simple and obvious truth.
"Mass is what. Mass and volume and velocity and inertia and power. You never stunted this much weight before, did you?"
"No; but what of it? I took a course in piloting once, in my youth." He was then a grand old man of twenty-eight or thereabouts. "I can line up the main rear center pipe onto any grain of sand you want to pick out on that field, and hold her there until she slags it down."
"If you think you can spell 'able,' hop to it!"
"QX, this is going to be fun." Henderson gleefully accepted the challenge, then clicked on his general alarm microphone. "Strap down, everybody, for inert maneuvering. Class 9. Four G's on the tail. Tail over to belly landing. Hipe!"
The Bergenholms were cut and as the tremendously massive superdreadnought, inert, shot off at an angle under its Tellurian intrinsic velocity, Master Pilot No. 1 proved his rating. As much a virtuoso of the banks and tiers of blast keys and levers before him as a concert organist is of his instrument, his hands and feet flashed hither and yon. Not music?—the bellowing, crescendo thunders of those jets were music to the hard-boiled spacehounds who heard them. And in response to the exact placement and the precisely measured power of those blasts the great sky rover spun, twisted and bucked as her prodigious mass was forced into motionlessness relative to the terrain beneath her.
Four G's, Kinnison reflected, while this was going on. Not bad—he had thought that it would take five; possibly six. He could sit up and take notice at four, and he did so.