Instead of decreasing the speed further, he nosed the craft down. The speed increased slightly, and then, like an airplane in flight, he brought the craft slowly broadside by degrees. The effect of the slow turn was to catch the atoms on the flat bottom so that the downward rush was transformed into a horizontal rush. The craft was speeding in an orbit parallel to the surface of the earth. Captain Bonnet had brought the space ship out of a tail spin. Instantly he shut off the fuel valves, leaving the remainder of the fuel available for the cooling apparatus. Lieutenant Riley looked wide-eyed at the hemisphere beneath the craft. "Well, we're here and we've less than a gallon of fuel," he said. "What next?" "Unless there's an accident, we're going to land on an ounce or two," Captain Bonnet replied. "A meteor doesn't use any fuel, but it has accidents. That tiny bit of fuel is going to keep us from having an accident--I hope." "That fuel is mighty potent," the lieutenant admitted. "It's the most powerful explosive known. But old Terra's gravity is a pretty big thing, too." "For every action there must be a reaction," Captain Bonnet said. "Strangely, no one ever considered this principle in respect to coming down, as well as going up." "Gravity is action and you're the reaction in that case," the lieutenant observed. "Not exactly. The escape velocity of the earth is gravity in reverse--if we can twist our minds around to think of it that way. We manufacture the escape velocity with our rocket fuel and use it to neutralize gravity. An object going 6.9 miles a second goes far enough around the earth in a second that the earth's curvature doesn't catch up with it, so to speak." "I hope you're sure of your reactions, although it doesn't make a lot of difference if we get this message down." "We're hitting the atmosphere at a speed close to the escape velocity of the earth. If we were going that speed we'd never get any closer to the surface. But we're being slowed so that we're falling--not very fast, but fast enough. Our speed _around_ the earth is about 6.9 miles a second, minus a few decimals. Our speed _toward_ the earth isn't very fast--I'd say a few feet a second. Our only problem now is to stop our forward speed without speeding our downward speed." "I don't suppose you're very optimistic about it?" the lieutenant asked, hopefully. "No," the captain admitted, "but we can try. You've seen airplanes land at speeds of one hundred miles an hour or more. That was their speed forward. Their speed downward was measured in feet per minute. That's our problem now. We've got to land like an airplane--make a deadstick landing without crashing." "Oh we might be able to land, but the minute we touch, some of our forward speed is going to get us into trouble. Remember, an airplane has wheels."