Deliberately, Farradyne turned his ship towards Terra and hit the ultradrive. "They called me a hot-pants pilot," he gritted.
Yellow-green Terra raced up and up and up through the spectrum and burst in size from an unwinking pinpoint of light to a shockingly-large disc that zoomed towards them. They saw its roundness come out of the sky in a myriad of colors until it filled the dome above them. Norma screamed; but by the time her voice had stopped echoing through the control room, Terra was past them by a good many miles of clean miss, and Farradyne had cut the ultradrive. He grunted unhappily because he was now as far from Terra on the other side as he had been before he took the chance. This mad use of the enemy ultradrive in ducking around the solar system was like trying to make a fifty-ton clamshell digger split a cigarette paper. At two light years per hour, their speed was enough to take them from Sol to Pluto in one second flat. He could not control it finely enough to do more than zoom off out of sight of the starship.
Farradyne shrugged, and patted Norma on the shoulder. "I doubt that my aim is good enough to hit the thing," he said. He turned the Lancaster end for end abruptly and tried a quick flick of the toggle. Once more Terra leaped at them, a swirling kaleidoscope of color, looming into monster size and then flicking past.
When they came out of it, Terra was behind them by a few million miles. Farradyne thought for a moment. "Maybe we—" he reached out and pressed the red button on the auxiliary panel—"are being tracked by the generator doodad they put below."
"But what are we going to do now?"
"Hit for Terra!"
XXVI
Farradyne set the drive for Terra and then sat there, tense and waiting. The radar wiggled into its warning trace, almost dead ahead.
They moved to intercept him, but Farradyne raised the drive to four gravities and plunged on. The starship grew, and behind it Terra grew. The radio burst into sound and Farradyne grabbed the microphone and said, "Come and get me, fellows!"