Santos and
Pederson cast the landing boat adrift and shoved it away from the
anchored boat. In a moment fire spurted from the bottom tube, spreading
over the dull metal and licking at the feet of the Planeteers.
Rip watched the boat rise upward to the great, sleek, dark bulk of the
_Scorpius_. The landing boat maneuvered into the air lock with brief
flares from its exhausts. In a few moments the sparkling blast of
auxiliary rocket tubes moved the spaceship away. O'Brine was putting a
little distance between his ship and the asteroid before turning on the
nuclear drive. The ship decreased in size until Rip saw it only as a
dark, oval silhouette against the Milky Way. Then the exhaust of the
nuclear drive grew into a mighty column of glowing blue, and the ship
flamed into space.
For a moment Rip had a wild impulse to yell for the ship to come back.
He had been in vacuum before, but only as a cadet, with an officer in
charge. Now, suddenly, he was the one responsible. The job was his. He
stiffened. Planeteer officers didn't worry about things like that.
He forced his mind to the job at hand.
The next step was to establish a base. The base would have to be on the
dark side of the asteroid, once it was in its new orbit.
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