The face stared at him with great eyes full of unspeakable hate, and spat a word which had not been in the language when the Quest III was launched. The screen went suddenly blank.
Knof Llud turned away, and his eyes fell on another vision screen. Earth was clear in it, dead ahead, a disk so near that land and sea were distinguishable with the naked eye, and coming rapidly nearer. The sight cost him a moment's nostalgic pain; then he thought of the little men, swarming ant-like over every square foot of habitable land.... Vermin he had called them; vermin they were.
He found himself, for no sensible reason, counting seconds. He had got to seventeen when the screen that showed Earth dissolved into a featureless and blinding glare.
At the same instant a force too tremendous for the senses to register smote the Quest III. The interior of the ship, everything and everyone in it seemed to stretch and distort like rubber as the gravitic field was strained beyond its elastic limit. The lights went out as the drive units claimed the last erg of available energy and shrieked their overloaded protest through the crushing and twisted darkness.
But then the lights went on again and the ship was hurtling free in space. Its people picked themselves up dazedly and tried to understand why they were still alive.
"Gee, Dad," young Knof said admiringly as he dabbed at a blackening eye, "what did you do?"
"I didn't do much," said the captain. "The fireworks were from our little friends. I just took your advice about getting the other fellow mad, and it worked. They just shut their eyes and swung with everything they had."
The boy gazed at the vision screen where the Sun was already a star again. He whistled. "They had plenty."
"I thought the heavy artillery must be ready on Earth in case we kept going that way. It was—enough of it to knock us right out of the System at close to the speed of light. Just how close I don't know yet ... ah." He took a couple of sheets of figures from the hands of Gwar Den, and devoured them rapidly. He nodded with satisfaction to the anxious faces around. "We must have been hit simultaneously by fire from all over one hemisphere—and the forces' resultant, which is now our course, came out as I had hoped.... Our velocity is close enough; the journey will take about fourteen years, ship's time, but most of us can expect to live that long—"