An alarm gong sounded through the open communicator, and directly afterward, the men in the power room could hear the relays closing. In the room above them, an oil switch closed with a crashing sound, its racket hardly muffled by the steel-grating floor. A rheostat whirred as it followed the impulses sent from the control board in the pilot's room; it whisked over a dozen contacts and came to rest. Four big pilot lights winked into brilliance above the informer panel, indicating that the ship was, 1.: Air-tight; 2.: Properly air-conditioned; 3.: Possessed of sufficient power for flight; and 4.: Ready to lift. Behind a two-foot dial, a diffused light glowed, illuminating the face which would indicate the acceleration in feet per second. A small dynamotor whined up the scale and into the region of inaudibility, and a series of safe lights went on; lights that would be on all the time regardless of what happened to the rest of the operating equipment. The meters of the alphatron moved slightly, and then leaped toward the top peg, stopping before they hit as the meter-sensitivity was cut accordingly. The mag-grav generator meters followed suit, and then the mech-grav meters went through the same dance. Then, far above them in the larger part of the ship, a remotely controlled tap on a bank of high-powered resistors made two steps forward, and an oil switch that connected the drive's electronic requirements to the closed-system turbine went home. Energy charged the gravitic equipment with operating power—
And the Haywire Queen lifted upward!
The accelerometer moved quickly up the scale toward twenty.
"We made it!" yelled Jimmy Wilson.
"We're in!" shouted Pete Thurman.
"Thank God!" breathed McBride. "I'm going to call the Lens and tell Doc Caldwell that I'm on the way—Hammond, what is that woman doing?"
The accelerometer had passed twenty, and was approaching twenty-five.
"Probably bunged the accelerometers out of sync when we crash-landed," said Hammond. "They're the standard Hooke Accelerometers, you know, and we may have stretched the spring a bit. She'll stop soon."
"It's all right," said McBride. "It just makes us get there sooner, but she shouldn't be playing with the drive this close to Pluto. If we've missed something, we'll smack."