In the other direction, out from the asteroid, was the gray SP47 with Stella.
But she was already blasting the SP47's rockets! That meant she had seen what was to happen, realized she couldn't stop it from happening, and was getting up speed to rescue him as soon as possible!
"Thank God!" he muttered. Then he turned his head to watch the unfolding drama below.
The Hell Bat was seconds away from its target, the junkship. The asteroid under the junkship was a rough surface that covered a good portion of the heavens. He could plainly see the rock formation of its surface.
And something down there moved. A large square hole appeared well away from the freighter. A soft beam of radiance shot out, bathed the silver length of the Hell Bat, reflecting—
The Hell Bat wasn't there. It had been there—and vanished. The pale beam of light from the hole in the planetoid winked out. The Hell Bat had vanished and the freighter was untouched!
At two thousand miles per hour Larry watched the planetoid shoot by less than ten miles away, seeming to rotate so that the freighter went over the horizon, leaving only the swiftly dwindling planetoid itself.
Larry's gaze jerked to the gray bulk of his SP47 with its long rocket tail as Stella drove it in pursuit of him. But even the SP47 was getting smaller. It would take time for it to reach his speed and start overtaking him.
They dwindled, the SP47 and the asteroid, until they were lost in the bottomless blackness of space. The vision of that hung before his eyes. The SP47 with Stella on board, and the barren rock surface of the planetoid, as they retreated into the blackness of infinity as though sucked down and down.
The stars became greedy hard-white eyes lurking in the blackness just beyond his fingertips; staring, waiting for him to go mad as the minutes became hours or eternities.