"There are two pretty good reasons for that," Paul Bonnet replied. "In the first place we'll be going too fast. If we tried to get into an orbit we'd sail right out again. To become a satellite of the earth--and I suppose that's what you're thinking of--we'd have to slow ourselves down to exactly the right speed necessary to overcome the earth's gravity. That would be hard to do with the instruments on this lifeboat, even if we had the fuel necessary to brake. In the second place, if we got close enough to the earth to be seen by a telescope, our orbital speed would be too fast for any 'scope to keep us in focus. We'd be mistaken on photographs for a meteor." "I guess we're up against it, eh Paul?" "I've been thinking," Captain Bonnet said. "What's this, a joke?" "There's one plan that might work--a suicide plan. But even that might be spoiled by an accident." "If there's a chance we ought to take it." "The message goes overboard first," the captain said. "After that we save ourselves. I've been studying the charts and I know just where we ought to land--that is in which hemisphere." "Yeah? Which?" "We're going to land somewhere in the Pacific." "That's a nice thought. Who's going to pick up our message in the middle of the Pacific?" "That's what gave me the idea of our suicide plan," Captain Bonnet said. "In order to drop the message over a city, we've got to float around the earth until we get near one...." Captain Bonnet began to explain his idea. The ship was going to hit the earth's atmosphere at a terrific pace. The deceleration would be pretty stiff--might be fatal--unless it were done gradually, but spacemen had learned the trick of pancaking a flat-bottomed craft on top of the atmosphere, then diving; pancaking again, diving again, until the deceleration was accomplished. This method of deceleration usually was accomplished with some use of rockets and it led to the old time spiral landing orbit. The atmosphere was the chief brake and the rockets were used to maneuver the craft into dives and pancakes. A first class cooling system was needed, of course, to carry off the heat of atmospheric friction, but the lifeboat was equipped with a cooling system and there was nothing to worry about from this source. But the lifeboat had little fuel. Captain Bonnet, however, had flown airplanes. He knew that braking could be accomplished without fuel if the flat-bottomed ship were used as a plane. He planned to use airplane tactics to slow the ship down to a speed closely approximating the escape velocity of the earth--6.9 miles a second. This would enable the ship to soar over the earth until it was over a good sized city, where the message from Outpost 53 would be dropped. "But if we land at that speed--and gravity will see to it we don't hit much slower--we'll be buried deep in the ground. Even if we hit the ocean, the deceleration will kill us--"