plunged deep in Earth's shadow, so that the look and feel of things was
that of an utterly suicidal plunge into oblivion. There was the seeming
of a vast sack of pure blackness before the nose of the space tug. She
started for it at four gravities acceleration, and Joe got his
headphones to his ears and lay panting while he waited for the figures
and information he had to have.

He got them. When the four-gravity rockets burned out, the tug's crew
painstakingly adjusted the ship's nose to a certain position. They flung
themselves back into the acceleration chairs and Joe fired a six-g
blast. They came out of that, and he fired another. The three blasts
gave the ship a downward speed of a mile and a half a second, and
Earth's pull added to it steadily. The Earth itself was drawing them
down most of a 4,000-mile fall, which added to the speed their rockets
built up.

Down on Earth, radar-bowls wavered dizzily, hunting for them to feed
them observations of position and data for their guidance. Back on the
Platform, members of the crew feverishly made their own computations.
When the four in the Space tug were half-way to Earth, they were
traveling faster than any humans had ever traveled before, relative to
the Earth or the Platform itself. When they were a thousand miles from
Earth, it was certain they would clear its edge. Joe proposed and
received an okay to fire a salvo of Mark Tens to speed the ship still
more. When they burned to the release-point and flashed away past the
ports, the Chief and Haney panted up from their chairs and made their
way aft.

"Going to reload the firing-frames," gasped the Chief.

They vanished. The space tug could take rockets from its cargo and set
them outside its hull for firing. No other ship could.

Haney and the Chief came back. There was dead silence in the ship, save
for a small, tinny voice in Joe's headphones.

"We'll pass Earth 600 miles high," said Joe in a flat voice. "Maybe
closer. I'm going to try to make it 450. We'll be smack over enemy
territory, but I doubt they could hit us. We'll be hitting better than
six miles a second. If we wanted to, we could spend some more rockets
and hit escape velocity. But we want to stop, later. We'll ride it out."

Silence. Stillness. Speed. Out the ports to Earthward there was purest
blackness. On the other side, a universe of stars. But the blackness
grew and grew and grew until it neatly bisected the cosmos itself, and
half of e