"K-kim!" said Dona, choking.
"I'm quite all right," he told her. But he wiped sweat off his face. "Those beams aren't pleasant, no matter how short the feeling is."
He turned back to the controls. The faint whine of the gyros began. The Starshine began to turn about. Kim applied power. But it took a long time for the ship's nose to be turned exactly and precisely back in the direction from which it had come.
"It's getting ticklish," he said abruptly. "There's less than a cupful of fuel left."
"Space!" said the Mayor of Steadheim. He looked sick and weak and frightened. "What happened?"
"We were in a sort of orbit about Khiv Five," said Kim, succinctly. "We had a decoy ship out behind us. A warship spotted our arrival. It sneaked up on us and let go a blast of its beams—the same beams that killed all the men on Khiv Five.
"They didn't bother Dona—she's a girl—but they would have killed us had not a relay flung the Starshine away from there. The beams got left behind. So did the dummy ship. I think they'll clamp on to it to look it over. And if our engines keep turning over long enough, we'll be all right. Now, let's see!"
His jaw was set as the transmitter-drive came on and the familiar crazy gyration of all the stars again took place and the gongs rang once more. But his astrogation was perfect. There was the ringed sun Khiv again with its banded fifth planet and its polar ice-cap and its equatorial belt of desert with the wide bands of irrigated land crossing it. Kim drove for the planet. He looked at the fuel-gauge.
"Our tanks," he said evenly, "read empty. What fuel's left is in the catalyzer."
A needle stirred on the bank of indicators. Dona caught her breath. Kim sweated. The indication on the dial grew stronger. The electron-telescope field sparkled suddenly, where light glinted on glistening metal. Kim corrected course subtly.