His short gasps seared his mouth, and his heart was like a gigantic pile-driver inside him, struggling to burst its way through his chest.
And then as though it had all been but part of a timed experiment in some weird laboratory, the sensation of being crushed to death began to abate. He could see the grav needle again, and it had already fallen back to two. Speed was now in unit miles per hour, and the figures were dropping from nine hundred.
Doug forced himself to his feet.
"Dad ... Dad, are we O.K.? Dad?"
"Maybe," he said.
When the grav needle was steady at One, Doug reduced thrust to hold them hovering at a little more than two hundred thousand feet over the Atlantic, with the coastline of what to him was France almost directly below.
A sickening, quick drop and the horizon-ecliptic indicator showed parallel flight, and Doug could feel the thrust of the belly engines beneath his feet. Then he pressed the bottom button, then the middle, and the Atlantic was rushing beneath them. Carefully, he depressed the next one up. All the way in, he locked it. The velocity figure in unit miles per hour was fifteen thousand.
Eleven minutes later he cut the power again, slowed, brought the ship once more on its stern, and began his descent over Washington.
Within moments they would spot him, would be ready.
It would have to be fast, miles from the central space-port—a suburb, near a highway.