My strength had almost fully come back to me now. Quickly I got into another of the power-suits. They were a somewhat old-fashioned model, but adequate enough, a double-shelled fabric with electronic pressure-absorbing current in it; air-renewers, and the small power-units. I bloated the suit in another moment; closed the corridor slide. I let the air rush out through the outer slide as quickly as I dared. And then I catapulted out, not bothering with the rocket-stream but using full gravity-repulsion against the bulk of the _Seven Stars_. Far down, ahead of me, for an instant I could just see the speck which was the fleeing Carson. Over me the bulk of the _Seven Stars_ hung, a great alumite cylinder, receding, dwindled by distance until it was only a tiny speck, lost among the blazing stars. With the huge, dull-lead disk of Asteroid-9 growing in visual size under me, I hurtled downward, using the asteroid's full attraction now as I sped after the escaping Carson. * * * * * Alone in space; a little drifting world of yourself. It is an eerie feeling. I have no idea how long that descent to Asteroid-9 took; one loses all sense of time as well as space, hurtling alone through the starry universe. The _Seven Stars_ long since was gone, vanished in the black illimitable distances of the blazing firmament above me. Head down, with full attraction in the little gravity plates of the padded shoulders of my bloated suit, like a diver I headed, hurtling for the dull-lead surface. I had picked up velocity swiftly. The great round disk of Asteroid-9 widened, spread, crawled outward and seemed visually coming up. For a time, sunlight was a thin stream on its distant curving limb of mountains. Then I went into the cone of its shadow. At once the look of the weird leaden mountains changed; starlight and earthlight mellow with a faint sheen that struck down through the clouds and tinged the giant ragged peaks with a tinting glow. The clouds, still far down, were broken in thin stratas here over this hemisphere. The disk had widened now so that presently it filled all the lower half of the firmament; and a visual convexity had come to it. I tried to calculate my velocity by the apparent enlarging of the desolate scene as it rushed up at me.