The board had been built for efficiency; of the minor duties aboard the vessel, communications was assigned to the engineer, control of the powerful grapples to the astrogator, on the theory that while intership communication might be needed simultaneously with the use of the magnets, the plotting of the course would not so coincide. The strobophones and radio—the latter dead and lightless at the moment—fronted Ryd as he fidgeted in the engineer's place.
Arliess had delayed a moment. Now he answered harshly, "All right. What do you want?"
"I was sure you would see.... Your cooperation won't be difficult. The magnet rheostat is already stopped at the safety maximum for the fuel we're going to handle. Give them all full power, then." Ryd knew vaguely that too powerful magnetic fields upset delicate atomic balances, had in fact caused the great Tenebris disaster of 803 on Venus—a match-sputter, that, compared to what would soon hit North America—
Woodenly, Arliess gave the magnets power. Unseen, his hands curled themselves tensely inside his sweat-slippery rubberized gloves; he was dangerously near hysteria. His keen, youthful imagination could see all too clearly into the near future. Over half of Earth, the skies would be red; there would be storm and earthquake, mountains splitting, rivers in flood, the fires of new volcanoes.
Shahrazad picked up speed again, swinging in to intercept the power cylinder in its constant flight. She forged forward on bright wings of flame, a small, squat ship of Fate, not a part but a target. [1]rest on her broad plated back.
"Half magnets," said Mury shortly, firing another bank of tubes to correct his course. Still robot-like, Arliess obeyed. His right hand obeyed. But his left snaked very slowly off the dash, under the detector box at his elbow, captured a dangling wire. Then—bend this way, bend that way, bend this way—
The last power-thrust died. Inch by inch, Shahrazad and the fuel shell drifted together in their parallel courses. "Full magnets," ordered Mury, and the drift accelerated. For two long, waiting minutes it continued; then the towship lurched slightly, like a boat meeting a long swell, and the great masses met with a prolonged grinding of curving steel on stegosauric plates of iron. A moment while they settled solidly together and clung, locked; then the rockets roared once more to life and Shahrazad surged ahead evenly. To the greatly-overpowered towship, the mere sixty tons of the loaded cargo shell made little or no difference.
Mury sat bolt upright in his universal chair. His face was masked and serene, but the straight line of his head and neck was eloquent. His hand, resting lightly on the controls, was that of Zeus, gripping a thunderbolt.
Slowly, without speaking, he drove the ship's nose upward—upward as they were leveled off, but in reality downward, for gradually from overhead the great black curve of a planet's dark limb crept down, shutting out the stars. Then its sunlit side burst into sight and the pallid glare came flooding through the great nose window to make the glow-lamps needless.
It was Earth, and somewhere on that great globe, where the distorted shape of North America sprawled through half a dark hemisphere, was Pi Mesa. For this ship of Fate, not a port but a grim target.