"
There was a pause while Astro and Roger considered this.
"That would mean," asked Roger, "that we'd be here when the reactor
units go off, wouldn't it, sir?"
"That's right, Manning," said Connel, admitting to the danger. "Even if
Junior were blasted out of the pull of the sun, we couldn't survive the
explosions."
"Couldn't we blast off in the jet boat and then land after the
explosions, sir?" asked Astro.
"Yes," admitted Connel, "we could do that. But the radioactivity would
be so powerful we couldn't last more than a few days. We have no
antiradiation gear. Not even food or water." He paused and scanned the
sky. "No," he said in a surprisingly casual voice, "the only way we can
get out of this is for Tom to come back and get us."
Shinny and Alfie came over and joined the group around the jet boat. No
one said anything. There wasn't anything to say. Each of them felt the
heat burning through his space suit. Each felt the same fear tugging at
his throat. There was nothing to say. The _Polaris_ was not to be seen;
the sky was empty of everything except Alpha Centauri, the great burning
mass of gases that once they had all seen only as a quiet twinkling star
in the heavens, never dreaming that someday it would be pulling them
relentlessly into its molten self.
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