"All right!" said the spacephone icily—but Calhoun thought there was relief in the voice. "You've only delayed our landing and lost a good many lives to disease!"
Calhoun swallowed something he suspected was his heart, come up into his throat.
"Now," he said, "we'll see if that's true!"
His ship had lost its spaceward velocity before it met the missile. Now it was gaining velocity toward the planet. He cut off the rocket to observe. He swung the hull about and gave a couple of short rocket blasts.
"I'd better get economical," he told Murgatroyd. "Rocket fuel is hard to come by, this far out in space. If I don't watch out, we'll be caught in orbit, here, with no way to get down! I don't think the local inhabitants would be inclined to help us."
His lateral dash at the missile had given him something close to orbital speed relative to the planet's surface, though. The Med ship went floating, with seemingly infinite leisure, around the vast bulge of the embattled world. In less than half an hour it was deep in the blackness of Canis' nighttime shadow. In three-quarters of an hour it came out again at the sunrise edge, barely four hundred miles high.
"Not quite speed enough for a true orbit," he told Murgatroyd critically. "I'd give a lot for a good map!"
He watched alertly. He could gain more height if he needed to, but he was worried about rocket fuel. It is intended for dire emergencies only. It weighed too much to be carried in quantity.
He spotted the city of Canopolis on the horizon. He became furiously busy. He inverted the little ship and dived down into atmosphere. He killed speed with rocket flames and air friction together, falling recklessly the while. He was barely two miles high when he swept past a ridge of mountains and the city lay ahead and below. He could have crashed just short of it. But he spent more fuel to stay aloft. He used the rockets twice. Delicately.