Mission: Earth "Doomed Planet" by Ron L. Hubbard Page B

He opened the throttles of his planetary drives. He felt the tug take the strain against the beams. Praying, he opened the throttles of the powerful Will-be Was time-converter drives. It stopped the tug with a backward yank. He still had power. Something struck the tug from below. He could not see in all the smoke but he hazarded that some of that infantry had made its way around the mountain shoulder. His absorbo-coat must be ripped to shreds. He was visible! He began to work the throttles. He was making the tug lunge again and again against the dead weight of the mountaintop. A shot struck the underside of the star-pilot chair beside him. It began to smoke and crackle. The controls were getting sloppier and sloppier. He pointed the nose of the tug upward at an angle of forty-five degrees. He once more slammed the throttles open. There was a sort of roar behind him. It began low and then rose up the scale like something wailing. The tug was moving. The shots which had been lacing the air suddenly halted. That infantry back there must be now contending with an earthquake under their very feet. Heller couldn't see. His screens were not working to be seen by. He could only guess what was happening. Was he going forward with the mountaintop towed behind or wasn't he?
     
 CHAPTER 2
     
    Many a fellow officer had often teased Heller about his "built-in compass." Sometimes on a warship flight deck he would sense that the gyros were in error. Seniors would ignore him but he would persevere and they would, finally, to get some peace, order a technician check. An error was always found but sometimes it was as little as a thousandth of a degree.' And even though this would make a significant mistake in course travelling at septuple light speed, nobody ever believed he could have detected it. Any gyro, they had said, is liable to be out a thousandth of a degree. Right now, astonishingly, he was totally uncertain which way he was going. He should have been able to detect, despite smoke, the north and south magnetic poles of Voltar. But he couldn't. Then he realized he had never before tried to navigate inside a time/space warp and that was where he was now. The black hole he was or was not towing extended its influence sphere to encase the tug. He did not know how fast he was going or even if he was going. His object was to get this mountaintop several miles from Palace City. If he did that, the command area of Voltar would drop back those thirteen minutes and appear in the same time band as the planet itself. Then, unless something else happened, the rebel forces could launch an assault and, with luck, break the defense perimeters and seize the place. He did not at that time know of Hisst's plan to hit the rebels' rear with the Apparatus forces from the staging area. His whole purpose was to expose the palaces and parks so they could be targeted by direct frontal assault. The security net would be gone if he had removed the source of all the power used in Palace City. Right then he wasn't thinking of anything except Where the blazes am I? The tug was on fire. It might explode. If he dropped this load, it might fall right back on the remaining mountain if it had not moved at all. He got some sand goggles over his eyes so they would stop streaming. He got down and moved up close to a screen. Maybe he could see something on it. He twiddled knobs. The screen was blank. His electronics were gone. The tractor engines were raving with the strain of the pull. The Will-be Was drives were thundering, fire or no fire. The planetary motors were screeching. The smoke billowed. The broken windscreen didn't seem to be letting in any air so that was no indicator of forward progress: rather it would seem to say that they were not going anyplace at all. He had a beltgun. With a sudden idea, he pulled it. Without being able to see its levers, he set it to impact-explosion. He reached out through the broken windscreen and fired straight down. It would be