His muscles contorted and agony filled him.
There was a roaring noise. The Starshine bucked violently. There were crashes and there was a feeling of intolerable weight which he could feel, despite his agony. The ship reeled crazily. It smashed through a wall. It battered into a roof. It spun like a mad thing and went skyward tail-first with Kim Rendell in frozen, helpless torment, holding two cables together with muscles utterly beyond his control.
It went up toward empty space, in which no other vessel was navigating anywhere.
3
Rays of Destruction
Eventually the "Starshine," alone in space as no other space-ship had been alone in twenty thousand years, behaved like a sentient thing. At first, of course, her actions were frenzied, almost insane, as if the Disciplinary Circuit waves which made Dona a statue of agony and kept Kim frozen with contorted muscles could affect the space-ship too.
Wildly the little vessel went upward through air which screamed as it parted for her passage. She yawed and swayed and ludicrously plunged backwards. The screaming of the air rose to a shriek, and then to a high thin whistle, and then ceased altogether. Finally she was free of the air of Alphin III.
After this she really made speed, backing away from the planet. Her meteor-detectors had been turned on in one of Kim's random splicings, and when current reached them they reported a monstrous obstruction in her path and shunted in the meteor-repelling beams. The obstacle was the planet itself, and the beams tried to push it away. Naturally, they pushed the ship itself away, out into the huge chasm of interplanetary space.
It kept up for a long time, too, because Kim was paralyzed by the broadcast waves. They were kept focused upon him by the psychographic locator. So long as those waves of the Disciplinary Circuit came up through the ionosphere, Kim's spasmodically contracted muscles kept together the two cables which had started everything. But the Starshine backed away at four gravities acceleration, faster and ever faster, and ordinary psychographic locators are not designed for use beyond planetary distances.
Ultimately the tormenting radio-beam lessened from sheer distance. At last the influence broke off suddenly and Kim's hands on the leads dropped away. The beam fumbled back to contact, and wavered away again, and presently was only a tingling sensation probing for a target the locators could no longer keep lined up.