"Well, they know I won't pile up on Terra. I'll steer to miss. No doubt they have another starship on the other side of the planet, waiting to intercept us out here after I elude the missile. Maybe they have a whole space net flung out. So hunker down, while I cut some didoes."
The radar showed the picture. The starship, now fearful of being detected by one of the long-range jobs on Terra, veered away on a tangent, while between them came the missile. Before them, the huge, solid-looking pip that indicated the bulking Terra, crept closer and closer. Farradyne cranked the rate-of-change dials and looked at the figures and nodded; the enemy had computed their missile's drive beautifully. It would meet the Lancaster at about the same time the Lancaster met Terra. Since everybody knew that Farradyne was not going to plow into Terra head on, he would have to steer to one side, but in order to keep from being hit by the missile, he would have to keep on driving right past Terra and out into space again—into the arms of the net on the other side, waiting outside the radar range from Terra.
The alternative was to cut the drive and try to land, and if this were tried the missile would blast the Lancaster far above Terra, long before the ship could signal its home planet that there was danger in space.
The missile's range closed home and Farradyne hiked the drive until the reaction-trail was a sun-bright fury and consumed the missile in its fierceness.
He cut the drive dead just in time to hear the first screaming complaint of the superstratosphere. Farradyne hit the upper reaches of Terra's air blanket at a point so high that the air there was a fairly hard vacuum, but the speed of the ship was high enough to pile quite a bit of air in front of it. The accelerometer went crazy, reading peg-stop against the end of the scale to the left. Their seat belts cut their thighs and the blood rushed to their heads. Norma's arms were flung above her head, but Farradyne fought the pressure that tried to lift his arms; he kept his hands on the control panel and caressed his levers gently so that the Lancaster pinwheeled.
The screaming of the air grew louder as the ship turned broadside, then diminished as its tail came around to align itself with the course of flight. Then with the pressure coming from the right direction again, Farradyne waited until the scream of tortured upper stratosphere faded away and the braking pressure stopped. He hit the drive as the Lancaster soared on past Terra.
Though the enemy must have been awaiting him on the line of flight past Terra, the Lancaster came nowhere near them. Its course had changed from the usual straight line to a long ellipse and the first turn of the curve had wound their course so far from the anticipated point that the enemy could not move over in time to intercept him. Terra rotated madly below and to the side, then came moving up in the angle of vision until it was at forty-five degrees off the nose and still rising.
Once more Terra loomed close and once more came the scream of air, deeper and yet shriller as Farradyne cut the drive and let the air-brake take over. They went on around Terra in a close ellipse, the air-screech rising and falling as their altitude changed.
Three times around Terra they went, then Farradyne turned his tail straight down with a few hard blasts and started to drop like a plummet.
Far to one side came a light flare and the radio gabbled something that Farradyne was too busy to catch; in the distance a jet freighter trailed a line of vapor and far to the south ultra-brightness of a spacecraft take-off trail climbed into the sky. Farradyne, busy checking the controls, the autopilot and the computing radar altimeter, aimed the Lancaster for the southern edge of Lake Superior, and they came down in a screaming fall.