g enough to compress the suit. Just the
same, he tried.

And while he was trying, he found himself in direct sunlight!

He had forgotten to run. Standing still on the asteroid meant turning with
it, from darkness into sunlight and back again. He yelled at Santos and
legged it out of there, moving in long, gliding steps. He regained the
shadow and kept going.

The first order of business was to stop the rock from turning. Otherwise
they couldn't live on it.

Rip knew that they had only one means of stopping the spin. That was to
use the tubes of rocket fuel left over from correcting the course. They
had three tubes left, but he didn't know if that was enough to do the job.

Moving rapidly, he and Santos caught up to Koa and the Planeteers.

The Connie prisoners were pretty well bunched up, gliding along like a
herd of fantastic sheep. Their shepherds were Pederson, Nunez, and Dowst.
The three Planeteers had a pistol in each hand. The spares were probably
those taken from prisoners.

The Planeteers were loaded down with equipment. A few Connie prisoners
carried equipment, too.

Trudeau had the rocket launcher and the remaining rockets. Kemp had his
torch and two tanks of oxygen. Bradshaw had tied his safety line to the
squat containers of chemical fuel for the torch and was towing them behind
like strange balloons. The only trouble with that system, Rip thought, was
that Bradshaw could stop, but the containers would have a tendency to keep
going. Unless the English Planeteer were skillful, his burdens would drag
him right off his feet.

Dominico had a tube of rocket fuel under each arm. The Italian was small
and the tubes were bulky. Each was about ten feet long and two feet in
diameter. With any gravity or air resistance at all, the Italian couldn't
have carried even one.

Rip smiled as Dominico glided along. He looked as though the tubes were
floating him over the asteroid, instead of the other way around.

Santos took the radiation detection instruments and the case with the
astrogation equipment from Koa. Rip greeted his men briefly, then took his
computing board and began figuring. He knew the men were glad he and
Santos had made it. But they kept their greetings short. A spinning
asteroid was no place for long and sentimental speeches.

He remembered the dimensions of the asteroid and its mass. He computed its
inertia, then figured out what it would take to overcome the inertia of
the spin.

The math