I worked the studs slowly, feeling the breath go out of my lungs with each one, and soon we had executed a turn of almost ninety degrees, with 4270 tumbling along parallel to us now, just a few miles off in the void. You could feel its weak gravity, tugging like a child's fingers might tug at your overcoat as you ran in another direction.
I pulled up all the studs together, and I could breathe again. For a moment it seemed that 4270 wouldn't be strong enough to grab us and hold us, to reel us in slowly like a fisherman with a whopper at the end of his line. But her distance didn't increase, either—and we went spinning along through the void with her like a lopsided dumbbell, the tiny planetoid and the smaller Karden.
Soon 4270 grew in the fore-port, and quite suddenly she wasn't alongside us any longer, but down below. Every time you come in for planet-fall you get that sensation, but it never ceases to be strange—one moment you're heading toward something which is in front of you, the next you're hurtling down upon it headfirst.
Only with 4270's light gravity, we didn't exactly hurtle. It was more like floating, slowly at first and then faster, and then I decided I'd better give one short blast from our forerockets to brake the fall. I pressed the stud and waited. There was nothing. Momentarily, the fore-tubes had jammed. Of all the times....
I heard Clair calling my name, "Jerry, Jerry!" and then 4270's jagged tumbling surface expanded up all around us and the planetoid didn't look so small any more. It looked huge, it could have been Jupiter. There came a grinding bump, and I thought I could hear my safety strap snapping. The black-light dials of the instrument panel zoomed up at me from someplace far beyond 4270, it seemed, and I met them head first with a hundred rocket tubes snorting inside my skull.
"Good morning," Clair said cheerfully.
"Good what?" I answered, not so cheerful.
"You slept for twelve hours, so now it's morning."