Esther paused to stare.
"But they'll try to kill us!" she protested. "They've tried hard! And if they find us we've no weapons at all—not even a hand-blaster!"
"To the contrary," said Stan dryly, "we've probably the most ghastly weapon anybody ever invented—only it won't work on any other planet than this."
Then he grinned at her. Now, he too was out of his space suit. The food he'd asked her to prepare was out on the table, but he ignored it. He took one step toward her. And then there came a muffled sound, picked up by the outside hull-microphones. It grew in volume. It became a roar. Then the yacht shifted position. Its nose tilted upward.
"The first step," said Stan, "is accomplished. I can't stop to dine. But—"
He kissed her hungrily. Five days—six, now—in space suits with the girl one hopes to marry has its drawbacks. An armored arm around the hulking shoulders of another suit of armor—even with a pretty girl inside it—is not satisfying. To hold hands with three-eighth-inch space gloves is less than romantic. And to try to kiss a girl three-quarters buried in a space helmet leaves much to the imagination. Stan kissed her. It took another shifting movement of the yacht, which toppled them the length of the cabin, to make him stop.
Then he laughed and went to the control room.
Vision screens were useless, of course. The little ship was still most of her length under sand, but the repellers' cones of thrust had dug a great pit down to her. Now Stan juggled the repellers to take fullest advantage of the storm. At times—with both beams pushing up—the ship was perceptibly lifted by uprushing air. And Stan could be prodigal with power, now. The skid was sharply limited in its storage of energy, but all the space between the two skins of the Erebus was a power bank. It could travel from one rim of the Galaxy to the other without exhausting its store. And the upward lift of whirlwinds—once there were six within ten minutes—and the thrusts of the repellers gradually edged the Erebus to the surface.
Before nightfall it no longer lay in a sand pit. It was only half buried in sand. And when the winds died down to merely savage gales, at twilight, and then slowly diminished to more angry gusts, and at long last there was calm without and even the impalpable fine dust that settled last no longer floated in the air, and the stars shone—then Stan was ready.
He turned on the ship's communicator and sent a full-power wave out into the night. He spoke. What he said would be unintelligible, of course, but he said sardonically to the empty desert: