He put his finger on the stud that would throw the ship into transmitter-drive, aimed straight at the disk of planet against the inferno of sun beyond. There was nothing more certain than that to miss the planet would fling them instantly into the sun. And there was nothing more absurd than to expect to come out of transmitter-drive within any given number of millions of miles, much less within a few thousands. But—
Kim pressed the stud.
Instantly there was blackness before them. A monstrous, absolute blackness filled half the firmament. It was the force-field-shielded planet, blotting out its sun and half the stars of the Galaxy. Kim had made a bull's-eye on a target relatively the size of a dinner-plate at eleven hundred yards. More than that, he had stopped short of his target, equivalent to stopping a bullet three inches short of that place.
He said in a queer voice:
"The—relay worked—even backward, Dona."
8
Dark Barrier
For a time Kim sat still and sweat poured out on his skin. Because their chances had seemed slight indeed. To stop a space-ship at transmitter-speed was impossible with manual means, anyhow. It could cross a galaxy in the tenth of a millisecond. So Kim had devised a radiation-operated relay which threw off the drive when the total radiation reaching a sensitive plate in the bow had reached an adjustable total.
If in an ordinary flight the Starshine headed into a sun—unlikely as such an occurrence was—the increased light striking the relay-plate would throw off the drive before harm came. But this time they had needed to approach fatally close to a star. So Kim had reversed the operation of the relay. It would throw off the drive when the amount of light reaching it dropped below a certain minimum. That could happen only if the ship came up behind the planet, so the sun was blacked out by the world's shadowed night-side.
It had happened. The glare was cut off. The transmitter-drive followed. The Starshine floated within a bare few million miles—perhaps less than one million—of a blue-white dwarf star, and the two humans in the ship were alive because they had between them and the sun's atomic furnaces, a planet some six thousand miles in diameter.