The nose of the skid touched solidity. It had burrowed down nearly fifty feet, with the aid of whirlwinds, and come to the yacht Erebus.
But it was another hour before accident and fierce efforts on Stan's part combined to let him reach the air-lock door, and maneuver the skid to keep that doorway clear, and for Esther to climb in—followed by masses of slithering sand—and Stan after her.
Inside the buried yacht, Stan fumbled for lights. He made haste to turn off the signaling device that had led him back to it deep under the desert's surface. And it was strangely and wonderfully still here, buried under thousands of tons of sand.
Esther slipped out of her space suit and smiled tremulously at Stan.
"Now?"
"Now," said Stan, "if you want to, you can start cooking. We could do with a civilized meal. And I'll see what I can do toward a slightly less uncertain way of life."
He went forward. The Erebus was a small yacht, to be sure. It was a bare sixty feet over-all, and of course as a pleasure craft it had no actual armament. But within two bulging blisters at the bow the meteor-repellers were mounted. In flight, in space, they could make a two-way thrust against stray bits of celestial matter, so that if a meteor was tiny it was thrust aside, or if too large the Erebus swerved away.
From within, Stan changed the focus of the beams. They had been set to send out tiny reaction beams no larger than a rifle bore. At ten miles such a beam would be six inches across, and at forty a bare two feet. He adjusted both to a quickly widening cone and pointed one up, the other down. One would thrust violently against the sand under the yacht, and the other against the sand over it. The surface sand, at least, could rise and be blown away. The sand below would support the yacht against further settling.
He went back to where Esther laid out dishes.
"I've started something," he told her. "One repeller beam points up to make the sand over our heads effectively lighter so it can be blown away more easily. The storm ought to burrow right down to us, with that much help. After we're uncovered, we may, just possibly, be able to work the ship up to the surface. But after that we've got to do something else. The repellers aren't as powerful as a drive, and it's hardly likely we could lift out of gravity on them. Even if we did, we're a few light-centuries from home. To fix our interstellar drive we need the help of our friends of the grid."