"It did better than we did," said Mike. "It's a good 200 miles ahead.
Down at the Shed, they're recalculating for us. We'll have to land with
six grazes instead of eight. We lost too much speed."

Joe went staggering, again weightless, to look out a port for the other
ship. He should have known better. One does not spot an eighty-foot
space ship with the naked eye when it is 200 miles away.

But he saw something, though for seconds he didn't know what it was.

Now the little ship was 300 miles high and still rising. Joe was dazed
and battered by the vibration of the ship in the graze just past. The
sister space ship hadn't lost speed so fast. It would be traveling
faster. It would be leaving him farther behind every second. It was
rising more sharply. It would rise higher.

Joe stared numbly out of a port, thinking confusedly that his hull would
be dull red on its outer surface, though the heating had been so fast
that the inner surfaces of the plating might still be cold. He saw the
vast area which was the curve of the edge of the world. He saw the
sunlight upon clouds below and glimpses of the surface of the Earth
itself.

And he saw something rising out of the mists at the far horizon. It was
a thread of white vapor. The other rocketship was a speck, a mote,
invisible because of its size and distance. This thread of vapor was
already 100 miles long, and it expanded to a column of whiteness half a
mile across before it seemed to dissipate. It rose and rose, as if
following something which sped upward. It was a rocket trail. The
violence of its writhings proved the fury with which the rocket climbed.