We were just about dead center over the Moon itself, and McGinty had started drifting in what would have been a perfect, if wide, orbit around it. Continuing in it, he'd've circled the side opposite Earth, and then started back toward the orbit of our satellite. Either that, or, as we'd expected, broken from it and rendezvoused with one of the Comrades. Only it wasn't working that way.
McGinty was breaking his orbit, all right, but not toward Space. He was going down. He had cut the stern rockets and was using his bow jets to slow himself enough to kill the velocity that had balanced him in his orbit. Slowly but as surely as politicians have two faces, Moon gravity would take over, pull him down, split him wide open on the jagged edge of Aristillus crater.
"He's out of his head," I heard Loftus saying. "Clean gone. An L-8 can't land; an orbit rig can't take even two Gs and hold together."
McGinty was peeling off, falling.
We just stood at the port and watched. Knight kept him in the two-incher.
Falling in that lazy, gradual, ever-steepening airless glide until soon it would be straight up-and-down. The Moon just hung there, cold, bleak, waiting. Waiting to rip McGinty all to hell on the ragged peaks of its gutted, inhumanly beautiful terrain. A strange love affair had McGinty, through the satellite port as he played his accordion.
I was pulled out of it by the racket on the H-F receiver, and Loftus was clambering over to it as fast as I was.
"This is Kolomar," the voice said. "Destroy him. Now. That's an order, Kenton."
Loftus looked at me. So did Knight.