ty, and its beam-director mirror swung in a huge arc. Sixteen
thousand centimeters per centimeter of original motion. Eight hundred
and seventy-three meters in the first second, before the tracking
servos took over and began to fight back.

* * * * *

Hot Rod fought at the end of its tether like a mighty jellyfish hooked
on the end of a line.

Gradually the swings decreased. Four hundred meters; two hundred
meters; one hundred meters; fifty meters; twenty-five meters--and it
had come back to a nearly stable focus on the sun.

But the beam director had also been displaced, and vibrated.
Internally, the communications beam to Thule Base had been
interrupted; and the fail-safe had not failed-safely.

The mighty beam had lashed out. The vibrations of the directing mirror
began placing gigantic spots and sweeps of unresistible energy across
the ice cap of Greenland, in an ever-diminishing Lissajous pattern.

By the time the servos refocused the communications beam on Thule,
there was no Thule; only a burnt-out crater where it had been.

Slowly, but surely, the giant balloon settled itself to the task of
burning a hole through the Greenland ice cap at a spot eighty miles
north of that now-burnt-out Thule Base that had originally been
planned as a test of its accuracy; and to the simple task of holding
that focus in spite of the now steady, though infinitesimal
acceleration under which it joined the procession headed by Lab One.

Now that the waves of action and reaction from the shock energy of its
sudden start had subsided, Hot Rod's accuracy was proving great
indeed; and its beam focus was proving as small as had been
predicted.

But the instruments that would have measured those facts no longer
existed.

In the engineering control center of Space Lab One, the Confusor
churkled quietly and continued to pit its mosquito might against its
now nearly seventy-eight million pound antagonist, as the protons and
electrons of the plastic that was center to its forces did their
inertial best to occupy that position in space towards the north star
in which the warped fields around them forced them to belong--the
mosquito strained its six hundred forty pound thrust against its giant
in the per second per second acceleration that was effective only in
the fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a centimeter in the first
second, but that compounded its fractions per second.

* *