Then he looked again, this way and that. He nodded inside his helmet.
He might as well try.
Returning to the sled, he started the engine and lashed himself fast again. He steered away from the crater, and around. He made a great looping journey of twenty miles or so across the plain, building speed all the time.
As he rounded the rear curve of his course, he was driving along at two hundred and sixty miles an hour, and he had to apply pressure to the boom with both hand and knees to point the sled back straight for the notch. Straightening his humming vehicle into a headlong course, he leaned forward and sighted between the upcurved runners.
"Now!" he urged himself, and watched the break in the crater wall rush toward him.
It greatened, yawned. He leaped through, and with a groaning gasp of prayer he dragged the boom over to steer the sled right.
It worked, as he had not dared hope. The runners bounced, bit. Then he was racing around the inside of the great cup's rim, like a hurtling bubble on the inner surface of a whirlpool's funnel. Two miles across, three miles and more on the half diameter—the engine laboring up to three hundred miles an hour, centrifugal force holding it there—
Little more than thirty seconds raced by when he knew he had won. He saw the far notch growing near. He came to it in a last booming rush, and hurled his whole weight against the boom to face the runners into the notch.
Under the low-dropping sun, he and his sled shot into open country beyond the range.