He saw that the keel of the _Sandra_ had torn a great, mangled rent in the dome and through this the air had rushed out. Space had taken possession. The disintegrating rays which had been burning at the _Sandra_ had been snapped off with the sheathing of invisibility; in that one wild second of impact, all the asteroid's functioning mechanism had been destroyed. Lar Tantril had not thought quite far enough: he had not sealed the buildings air-tight against a possible crashing of the dome, and for that reason alone he and his men had gone down in full defeat under the drive of the Hawk. Shreds of flotsam drifting and turning in space around the dome now became visible--bits of wreckage hurled out from the tear, and also a number of white, bloated things which once had been the bodies of men. The outrushing tide of air had taken them along, and now they drifted, shapeless, all of a kind, in the lifelessness of space. "Merciful heaven!" whispered Eliot Leithgow, staring at the desolation. "Gone! Just snuffed out!" The Hawk took over again and brought and held the _Sandra_ in a position a quarter of a mile above the now rapidly falling asteroid. "They're all dead, I'm sure," he said in a voice hard and emotionless as his graven face. "They must be, for the asteroid is now visible, and that means that the doors of the power building were open. Inside and out, all there is dead, machinery and men.... Still, it had to be done. It was they or we. A variation of the trick we used to escape from the dome before, Eliot; and Tantril of course didn't expect it and protect himself as Ku Sui did that other time. It's all done now--yes, its gravity-plates too, for see, it's turning." "And fast!" murmured Friday. The body was rotating around its longer axis at about twice the speed of an Earth-watch's second hand. Now the dome was sliding under, out of their sight, the craggy rock belly coming up to take its place. Nine hundred miles away was Earth--rather, less than that, for the body was now free to accept the tremendous gravity pull of the planet so near. Soon it would plunge to destruction there.... * * * * * A thought came to Carse, and he said: "Perhaps Ku Sui would like to see what has become--" On the last word he stopped and whirled around. His eyes were suddenly intense and his face startled. "I heard a hiss!" said Friday. "You too? Then it was a port-lock!" Carse turned to the visi-screen. "Look there!" he cried. In the screen Earth made a titanic background against which, a falling, dwindling figure in a clear-cut in the sunlight, gleamed space-suit. Down it went, rapidly, even as they stared, until it hung just off the also-falling asteroid. It was obviously preparing to enter the dome. "Take the helm, Ban, and watch him!" Carse ordered harshly, and ran aft from the control cabin.