CHAPTER II Four minutes came and went, while MacIlheny and the others smoked cigarettes and tried to maintain a certain amount of calm as they waited. At the end of the four minutes, the phone rang. Blake, who was nearest, answered. "Yes. Good! Okay, thanks, Dr. Vanner!" He cradled the receiver and turned to MacIlheny. "The Observatory. They've spotted Number Four. She's slowed way down and dropped. They're feeding the orbit figures to Orbits Division now, by teletype. She evidently hit a fast meteor, head on." MacIlheny nodded. "It figures. Tell Orbits to feed us a computation we can sight by--feed it directly into the Brain first, so we can get things going. We've got to get that satellite back up where she belongs!" As the figures came in, it became obvious that the orbit of Number Four had been radically altered. Evidently, a high-speed, fairly massive meteor had struck her from above and forward, slowing her down. Immediately, the satellite had begun to drop, since angular acceleration no longer gave her enough centrifugal force to offset the gravitational pull of the Earth. As she dropped, however, she picked up more speed, and was able to establish a new, different orbit. With this information fed into it, the electronic brain in the top twenty floors of the CGC Building went smoothly to work. Now that it knew where the satellite was, it could again focus the beams on her. Since the direction and velocity of the artificial moon in her new orbit were also known, the trackers could hold the beam on her. MacIlheny rubbed his chin with a nervous forefinger as he watched the instruments on the control board come to life again as contact was re-established. Meanwhile, Orbits Division was still at work. In order to re-establish the old orbit, the atomic rocket engines in the satellite would have to be used. Short bursts, fired at precisely the right time, in precisely the right direction, would lift her back up to where she belonged. It was up to Orbits Division to compute exactly how long and in what direction the remote-controlled rockets should apply their thrust. As the beams again locked on the wayward satellite, MacIlheny kept his eyes on the control board. Lights flickered and rippled across the panel; needles on various meters wavered and jumped. MacIlheny watched for several seconds before he said: "Blake! What the hell's wrong there?" Blake watched a set of oscilloscopes, four green-glowing screens which traced and re-traced bright yellow-green lines across their surfaces. His dark brows lowered over his eyes. "We can't get anything to her, Mac. She's dead. Either that meteor hit her power supply or else it did more damage than we thought." "No control, then?" Blake shook his head. "No control."