Stella in the SP47 had already matched speed with the planetoid and was drifting slowly toward it. In ten or fifteen minutes she would land.
Larry read his meters. Speed relative to the planetoid still in excess of 2200 miles an hour. Deceleration, two gravities. He would arrive and match speed in time to be a sitting duck. And he had no guns. A voice sounded. It was a slightly metallic voice. The voice of a robot. It said, "This is Rover. Land alongside your freighter."
"All right, Rover," Stella's voice came, quivering with relief and nervousness. Larry could almost hear her mental, "Down, Rover, down boy." She didn't sense what it meant for 2615 to call himself Rover. A dog's name. Not a human's. Remembrance of its heritage. Knowledge of the awful crime against it that the human race had committed. It was too abstract to her to be real.
And in the Hell Bat he'd be a sitting duck, without weapons, unable even to radio his position so that others could take up the chase.
Abruptly a plan formed in his mind. He thrust it away. It was worse than suicide. But it returned, whispering that he stood a chance, that even if he failed, it would be no worse than death.
The plan was simplicity itself. The freighter junkship was anchored against the surface of the planetoid and would be an unmoving target. Stella in the sleek gray SP47 was still many miles away from that target, slowly settling toward it. If he could get the Hell Bat headed directly toward the anchored junkship and then jump free, the Hell Bat would strike the freighter on the planetoid and destroy both the freighter and its cargo of robot bodies. It would destroy the robot, too—and his mission would be accomplished.
It would eliminate the necessity of matching speed with the planetoid. In fact, the speed he already had relative to the planetoid and the anchored junkship was enough to do the work.
It would take little force jumping out of the Hell Bat's airlock to gain sufficient perpendicular speed for his hurtling form to miss the planetoid—and that was the only drawback to the plan. He would hurtle outward into interstellar space at escape velocity, never to return or be found, unless Stella had presence of mind enough to come after him before she lost him.
If she didn't come after him.... Would he wait to go insane or to die from lack of oxygen? Or would he loosen his helmet and let the air in his lungs explode, choosing the second of agony before that kind of death instead of the slow horror and loneliness of the other?