The Forbidden Moon was like a sullen, silent nether world, with an atmosphere so rare that an unprotected human being would gasp and die in it in a few minutes! Even a man in a space suit could not hope to survive that desolation for long! Io seemed like a Pit now to Evan Harwich, an Abyss of Hell from which there was no escape! A place where no Earth being was meant to venture!
This moment was too grim to think of thrills. Helplessness removed that intriguing glamor utterly. And there was only savage determination left. That and smoldering hate of the man who had caused misfortune!
Presently, through the thin metal of his oxygen helmet, Harwich heard a soft, hissing, whistling sound. Gradually it grew stronger. The patrol pilot knew what it was, of course. He had entered the intensely thin upper atmosphere of Io, and the hissing was made by his own space armored body passing through those tenuous gases at fearful velocity.
The sound served as a signal for action. Again, though the situation was new to him, Harwich's training made his responses accurate. With a gauntletted hand, he groped for the metal ring on the pack that bulged from his chest. It was ancient history when he jerked that ring, but sometimes, in emergency landings like this, on worlds that had a blanket of air, however slight, it was still useful. In another second the patrol pilot was dangling beneath a gigantic mushroom of metal fabric. He felt the firm tug of the shrouds. Deceleration.
He wondered vaguely why the fragile parachute did not tear apart in the terrific speed of his fall. But it was the utter thinness of the air, of course, here in the upper layer. Its resistance was so very slight. So there was time for velocity to be checked gradually, as the air grew denser, and its retarding effect greater with lowered altitude.
Paul Arnold had opened his chute too. Its vast top, a hundred feet in diameter, gleamed dully in the faint sunshine.
In a great plume of dust far below, the derelict space ship crashed. Fire flew as the force of the impact generated heat. But the wreckage was out of sight, and there was only a pit smoldering on a bleak, dusty hillside. The RQ257 was buried deep.
Harwich and Paul Arnold landed several miles away from the grave of the ruined ship; for they had drifted with the thin, dry, frigid wind.
Their booted feet spanged painfully against the sand and broken rock, and they crumpled to their knees; for even in the feeble gravity of Io the impact had been heavy.