Adventures in the Far Future & Tales of Outer Space — page 191: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

He snapped the mike switch. “Go ahead, Thumbtack,” he Said. “We’re ready to copy.” They picked up Bertha as a faint point of light below and somewhat behind them, but without radar of their own they had no way of Knowing exactly how far away. The satellite was artificial. The men studied it wordlessly. It did not look like the product of an Earthly technology, Goodrich thought, although he could assign no specific reason for this feeling. Apparently spherical, and about the size of a dime on the view screen without magnification, it might have been ten feet across and a few hundred yards away, or a hundred feet and a mile. They seemed to be below and somewhat behind it, but overtaking, the relative bearing changing by about one degree per minute. There were hints of hatches or ports on its surface, and various protuberances which might have been antenna or telescopic gear. Or, Goodrich thought, if it was extraterrestrial, they might even be weapons, the strange unguessable weapons of science fiction. “O.K.,” he said. “Let’s get to work here. Swing the ship and get the nose camera working.” He turned to his perforator. “How do you set up an evasive course on a rocket?” he asked McKay. “You got any ideas?” The navigator shrugged. “We can’t zigzag, all we can do iS go in the direction were pointed. I’d say, since we want to use the nose camera anyway, just point her a couple of degrees off a collision course and set up a tape with random accelerations, that should foul up their firing data some, and if they're looking this way, we could be past and gone the other way before they could swing on us—maybe.” “Yeah, maybe,” Goodrich said. “All they have to do Is be ready to catch us going away on the other side, if they can see us at all they can see which way we're pointed.” He CORniclooo SS CO