I shook myself savagely. I couldn't deny that his words had given me a bad case of icicles on the vertebræ. I knew something else, though, too. That Lancelot Biggs, alive or dead, had never yet given me a bum steer. And that I, for one, meant to see this thing through—or bust!
Bust! I didn't like that word, either. Not when I thought of our new course, and us blasting hell-for-leather toward massive, crushing Jupiter.
Then somehow twenty-four hours, Earth standard, had passed. And by labors verging on the miraculous, we had completed the task set before us. And now, with the second part of Biggs' instruction before us, we were standing in the control turret of the weirdly altered Saturn, watching the small hand of the chronometer creep toward the thin black mark that represented our deadline.
Cap Hanson, who had been a bulwark of strength when there was work to do, was as squirmy as a hen on a cactus egg now that all we had to do was wait. He paced anxiously back and forth between the control-banks and the visiplate. Once he squinted through the perilens and turned to me nervously.
"You're sure you got that message right, Bert?" he demanded for maybe the thousandth time. "You couldn't have made a mistake."
"I could have," I reassured him, "but I'll bet you my pension I didn't. I've been pushing keys for too long not to get my did-da-dits straight, Skipper."
"We're awfully close to Jupiter," scowled the Old Man. "Awfully close. I—I don't like it. Not only that—but we're running away from Europa as fast as we can. If the Corporation ever finds out about this—"
"They can't miss," I said. "They know how long it should have taken us to get to Europa. Matter of fact, Cap, we should be landing there right now. We're going to lose a little time in establishing those claims. But if by losing a little time we can find Lanse Biggs again, why—"
"Awfully close!" complained the skipper. He turned to Todd suddenly. "Dick—we can't risk it! There must be a mistake somewhere. Jupiter fills all space before us. If we get caught in its gravitational power, we'll all be killed.