The hundredth-second sweep hand of his watch came around and up, and he began matching its motion with a rhythmic beat of his hand on the reversal lever as the hand crossed the tenth-second marks. By the time the hand was swinging close to the zero-second, his beat was close to perfect.
The hand crossed the top and Wilson beat down on the lever hard!
The ship swung around in space and the drive flared out on the forecourse as the tender began to beat its terrific velocity down. Wilson felt that peculiar prickling of the skin that comes with a swiftly closing warp-generator, but he knew that it was deliberate, and not a failure.
He tried to force it down faster; tried to make the driver harder. His hand rapped the power lever again and again, ramming it against its hard stop as if he could force the setting higher than maximum.
There would be particular hell to pay when he got back home, but he would have the personal satisfaction of having accomplished his mission. He put the future out of his mind because he had no idea of what kind of special hell would be given to a man who was successful, because of disobeying orders.
He watched the meter crawl down to the red mark and below. Then the warp-generator collapsed with a jar. It was a little too soon. The speed of the tender was still high—not above light, of course, but high enough so that its Einstein Mass created quite a warp in space.
He felt the heat leap high and knew that the tender had slowed with the same sort of deceleration as a bullet hitting a patch of thin wool. He did not lurch in the ship for he, himself, had the same Einstein Mass effect. He felt a hot-sweat fever fill him as the excess mass reconverted into energy.
He shook it off, but knew that eventually he would pay for that sudden fever, with its biological effects. Then the long-range search radar produced a distant response and Ted Wilson put everything out of his mind except the problem of matching velocities with the free-flying lifeship.
He called on the close-range radio, frantically pleading for those in the lifeship to alert and be ready. He got no answer, which made him break out in a cold sweat.