After that, there was nothing to do but wait and hope that he had cut his speed enough to bring him to the ship ahead of schedule by a shorter orbit.
Tremont finally gave up looking at his watch when he found himself peeping every three minutes, on the average. The immensity of space was by now instilling in him a psychological chill, and he drew both arms in from their sleeves to hug an illusion of warmth to him. The air pressure in the sleeves gradually overpowered the springs of the joints, and extended them to make a cross.
As far as he could tell from the gauges lined in a miniature row along the neckpiece of the suit, his heating system was functioning as designed. The batteries had an excellent chance of lasting longer than he would.
He began to dwell upon thoughts of squeezing Peters in the steel grip of his gauntlets until the pilot's fat face turned purple and his eyes popped. Another promising activity would be to bang Braigh's head against a bulkhead with one hand and Dorothy's with the other.
Wonder if they found the gun in my locker? he mused.
Finally, only a lifetime or two after he hoped to see it, he sighted the ship again. His watch claimed the trip had lasted less than ninety minutes.
He encountered unexpected trouble approaching the hull. Realizing that he was lucky to come close at all by such a guess, he tried to steer himself with brief jets from his air tank, and wound up on the verge of bashing directly into a fin. He avoided that, but had to use more air to spin back for a more gentle contact.
The metal felt like solid Earth to him as he seized the edge of a fin and planted the magnets of his boots firmly on the hull.
It was perhaps twenty minutes later, when Tremont was beginning to worry again about his air supply, that the hatch of the air lock began to open.