"Lo, with Thy lightnings Thou hast destroyed them, O Lord! Chip, lad--you hear me? The hour of retribution has come! They cower like craven lice on the flesh of the sphere that hid them. Go to the control panel, boy; press the studs numbered 1 and 12. Haste, while we have them at our mercy!"
Obediently Chip sprang to the board, plunged the studs Salvation had named. As he did so, the steady hum of the hypatomic deepened. There came the ponderous _thud!_ of a rocket jet exploding. Then another. Then almost at once the first again.
The floor beneath him shook, throbbed, trembled. Chip was conscious of a curious lightness, a sense of whirling giddiness that he recognized almost immediately. He had experienced the sensation once before when a spaceship in which he had been a passenger was thrown into axial revolution by the titanic tug of Jupiter. Clinging for support to whatever offered itself, he moved with difficulty to the room's vision-plates, opened the circuit that revealed the exterior of the _Aurora_, and--what he saw brought a cry to his lips. A cry in which was mingled triumph and awe and almost a certain horror-stricken, involuntary pity.
His depression of studs 1 and 12, firing-jets at opposite poles of the _Aurora_, had spun the tiny planetoid into axial rotation. It was whirling, now, like a gigantic top in the void. And from its surface, no longer held captive by the feeble artificial gravity, were hurtling the bodies of those whom a moment before had so proudly and confidently strode the asteroid's surface!
Chip saw one sight which would haunt him forever. Blacky Jordan emerging from the surface tunnel ... being whisked from the bosom of the _Aurora_ as if by an invisible hand ... drawn violently to his vacuum tomb. For the split second there was an expression of terrible, uncomprehending fear on the pirate's face--then there was neither face nor pirate. Just the black, inexorable depths of space, studded with the myriad planetoid shards which formed the Bog.
Afterward Chip Warren said to Dr. Blaine, "I'm afraid Doctor, that if we're ever to set foot again in any civilized port, you must take us there. After the _Aurora_ stopped revolving I went top-side to look for the _Chickadee_. I thought we might be able to repair it. But it's gone, just like Blacky Jordan and his crew. Everything on the surface of the planetoid was whisked away."