Jupiter and the Jovian worlds leaped suddenly backward, turned swiftly green, then blue, and faded in an instant into violet. The Sun spun coldly through space, retreating, dimming to a tiny ruby-tinted star.
The giant generators in the Invincible hummed louder now, continually louder, a steel-throated roar that trembled through every plate, through every girder, through every bit of metal in the ship.
The ship itself was plunging spaceward, streaking like a run-away star for the depths of space beyond the Solar System. And behind it, caught tight, gripped and held, Craven's ship trailed at the end of a tractor field that bound it to the space-rocketing Invincible.
The acceleration compensator, functioning perfectly, had taken up the slack as the ship had plunged from a standing start into a speed that neared the pace of light. But it had never been built to stand such sudden, intense acceleration, and for an instant Russ and Greg seemed to be crushed by a mighty weight that struck at them. The sensation swiftly lifted as the compensator took up the load.
Greg shook his head, flinging the trickling perspiration from his eyes.
"I hope their compensator worked as well as ours,” he said.
"If it didn't,” declared Russ, “we're towing a shipload of dead men."
Russ glanced at the speed dial. They were almost touching the speed of light. “He hasn't cut down our speed yet."
"We threw him off his balance. His drive depends largely on the mass of some planet as a body to take up the reaction of his ship. Jupiter is the ideal body for that… but he's leaving Jupiter behind. He has to do something soon or it'll be too late."
"He's getting less energy, too,” said Russ. “We're retreating from his main sources of energy, the Sun and Jupiter. Almost the speed of light and that would cut down his energy intake terrifically. He has to use what he's got in his accumulators, and after that last blast at us, they must be nearly drained."