“I think that solves our problem,” the captain spoke firmly. “If the young lady has courage enough to overlook the risk, the rest of us should have it, too. Thank you, Sue. We move at full rocket thrust to aid the Pole Star.”
As the Shannons went out into the corridor, Steve asked his sister, “Wow, Sue, what made you talk back to that big fellow like that?”
“He was so selfish!” Sue answered. “Besides, it made me mad to hear him say we didn’t know anything about space! Why, we’ve been over almost all of the Solar System, haven’t we, Dad?”
Her father pressed her shoulder. “Of course, honey. I’m proud of you, because I felt the same way.”
It took a few days for the freighter to reach the asteroid. The space ship, in going past the Earth, had come close enough for the Earth to be seen as a misty, green light. It made the twins long for home as they saw it.
“Sierra is like a big meteor, isn’t it, Dad?” Steve asked, as the three of them looked downward on the flat, egg-shaped rock.
His father nodded. “It’s often called, ‘The Flying Mountain,’ because of the low peaks on it. Sierra is only a mile long and less than that wide.”
“I remember from school that it wasn’t discovered until 1965,” Sue said.
“That’s because it’s so small and isn’t very bright in the sky,” her father spoke. “Most of the asteroids are much farther out, between Mars and Jupiter, but a few come in close to Earth like Sierra, Hermes, Eros and some others.”
The freighter landed safely in a flat area about two hundred feet from the Pole Star. The Shannons could see the damaged space ship jammed against a cliff. Brilliant sunshine reflected upward from bare dark rock, dazzling their eyes. It was over a hundred degrees on Sierra, for there was no atmosphere to check the sun’s heat.