He watched the futile struggle of the girl to tear the freighter loose, saw the ship whip about in a series of surging dives and evolutions that finally ceased as the ship slowly but surely was dragged into the midst of the whirlpool.
And now the two ships were but a few thousands of miles apart. Already, the gravity streams were tugging at the cruiser, striving to turn its flight into a diving plunge for the maelstrom's heart. Curt worked with a desperate calculating intensity, playing the power of the ship against the tides, as a master machinist judges the power of his tools.
He sent the cruiser to the left, flicked on the tractor ray, flashed its probing beam toward the freighter. The beam caught, whipped by, then flicked back. Curt could feel the instant tugging. He increased power, felt the shrill whine of the ray-machine building icy fingers in his brain. Then the sound was past the audible.
The tides swept over the cruiser, flipped it about like a leaf in a breeze, almost caused him to lose contact with the freighter. But the shimmering thread of the tractor's light did not break; the ships were locked together.
Curt coaxed the last bit of power from his rockets, sent his ship in a spiralling drive for free space. He smiled thinly, grimly, when the tossing of the cruiser lessened. He glanced from the vision port, wondering if they would get free.
A smashing blow struck the ship, drove it back, set metal to singing. Curt swore harshly. Space was filled with floating debris captured by the gravitic tides. Small chunks of meteoric rock flashed by, followed by clouds of dust as fine as gravel. The bloated, ruptured body of a space-ship rushed by in the opposite direction, hurled nowhere in its constant swinging about the area of dead space. Curt winced, when he caught the starshine on the bulgered bodies that trailed in its wake like a meteor cloud. He wondered, irrelevantly, who the men were.
And then from the darkness of space came a great sweeping clot of debris, the gutter rubbish of the space lanes. Ships that had been caught in the tides, meteors, rocks, all the flotsam that had been gathered through the ages.
But Curt had no time for that. He felt his ship winning free, sent it whipping to the left again, wondering if his rockets would burn out under the stupendous strain. And relief filled him, when he realized that he was pulling the other ship from its death-bed of gravity.
And even as he laughed, he felt all power cease in his ship.