Scanners on. Scanners on, kid....
He watched the screens again, unconscious of what his fingers did on the panels. The dull red sphere loomed large once more. The picture was off-center; without knowing what he did he rectified course with the bow jets; it was centered again. But it was a different place. Still the desert, but with ridges of brown-green at its horizon; oddly-formed crater-places....
It was coming up fast, now; faster, until the horizon was only a gentle arc against a thin span of blackness, and the rest was cold red.
Hardly knowing what he did, his fingers suddenly raced over the control console, even before the scanner-alarms began their ear-splitting clanging!
The ship lurched into a direction-change that threatened to wrench the hull apart, and the picture in the scanner reeled crazily. He knew his own brain was not dictating the commands of control to his fingertips, nor was it evaluating for itself the madly fluctuating values indicated on the panels. A human brain could not have done it, he knew that....
He had cut power. At least there was no power. He was falling at a crazy angle and the desert was rushing up now, hurtling up to smash him. They'd hit him, then, yet he'd felt nothing....
It was getting hot. His hull must be glowing, now, even in the thin atmosphere of Mars—it was a long fall. Slower than a fall on Earth, through thinner air layers, yet he was glowing like a torch.
The ocean of sand rushed up.
And suddenly his left hand rammed the full-power stud.
It was as though he'd been hit from behind with all the brute force of some gigantic fist, and there were two things. There was the split-second glimpse of a crescent formation suddenly wheeling toward him and there was the clang of the scanner-alarm. There were those two things his brain registered before the titanic force of full power squeezed consciousness from it and left him helpless.