Haney and the Chief came back. There was dead silence in the ship, save for a small, tinny voice in Joe's headphones.
"We'll pass Earth 600 miles high," said Joe in a flat voice. "Maybe closer. I'm going to try to make it 450. We'll be smack over enemy territory, but I doubt they could hit us. We'll be hitting better than six miles a second. If we wanted to, we could spend some more rockets and hit escape velocity. But we want to stop, later. We'll ride it out."
Silence. Stillness. Speed. Out the ports to Earthward there was purest blackness. On the other side, a universe of stars. But the blackness grew and grew and grew until it neatly bisected the cosmos itself, and half of everything that was, was blackness. Half was tiny colored stars.
Then there was a sound. A faint sound. It was a moan. It was a howl. It was a shriek.... And then it was a mere thin moan again. Then it was not.
"We touched air," said Joe calmly, "at six and a quarter miles per second. Pretty thin, though. At that, we may have left a meteor-trail for the populace to admire."
Nobody said anything at all. In a little while there was light ahead. There was brightness. Instantly, it seemed, they were out of night and there was a streaming tumult of clouds flashing past below—but they were 800 miles up now—and Joe's headphones rattled and he said:
"Now we can give a touch of course-correction, and maybe a trace of speed...."
Rockets droned and boomed and roared outside the hull. The Earth fell away and away and presently it was behind. And they were plunging on after the Moonship which was very, very, very far on before them.
It was actually many hours before they reached it. They couldn't afford to overtake it gradually, because they had to have time to work in after contact. But overtaking it swiftly cost extra fuel, and they hadn't too much. So they compromised, and came up behind the Moonship at better than 2,000 feet per second difference in speed—they approached it as fast as most rifle-bullets travel—and all creation was blotted out by the fumes of the rockets they fired for deceleration.
Then the space tug came cautiously close to the Moonship. Mike climbed out on the outside of the tug's hull, with the Chief also in space equipment, paying out Mike's safety-line. Mike leaped across two hundred yards of emptiness with light-years of gulf beneath him. His metal soles clanked on the Moonship's hull.