They were falling straight toward the dim red bulk.
"How far are we from it?" Fuller asked.
"At least several million—" Morey began. Then he looked at the distance recorded on the meteor detector. "ARCOT! FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE DO SOMETHING! THAT THING IS ONLY A FEW HUNDRED MILES AWAY!"
"There's only one thing to do," Arcot said tightly. "We can never hope to avoid that thing; we haven't got the power. I'm going to try for an orbit around it. We'll fall toward it and give the ship all the acceleration she'll take. There's no time to calculate—I'll just pile on the speed until we don't fall into it."
The others, strapped into the control chairs, prepared themselves for the acceleration to come.
If the Ancient Mariner had dropped toward the star from an infinite distance, Arcot could have applied enough power to put the ship in a hyperbolic orbit which would have carried them past the star. But they had come in on the space drive, and had gotten fairly close before the gravitational field had drained the power from the main coil, and it was not until the space field had broken that they had started to accelerate toward the star. Their velocity would not be great enough to form an escape orbit.
Even now, they would fall far short of enough velocity to get into an elliptical orbit unless they used the molecular drive.
Arcot headed toward one edge of the star, and poured power into the molecular drive. The ship shot forward under an additional five and a half gravities of acceleration. Their velocity had been five thousand miles per second when they entered hyperspace, and they were swiftly adding to their original velocity.
They did not, of course, feel the pull of the sun, since they were in free fall in its field; they could only feel the five and a half gravities of the molecular drive. Had they been able to experience the pull of the star, they would have been crushed by their own weight.
Their speed was mounting as they drew nearer to the star, and Arcot was forcing the ship on with all the additional power he could get. But he knew that the only hope they had was to get the ship in a closed ellipse around the star, and a closed ellipse meant that they would be forever bound to the star as a planet! Helpless, for not even the titanic power of the Ancient Mariner could enable them to escape!