ith air at intolerable pressure and heat.

The hull exploded outward where the rocket flames played. There was a
monstrous, incredible jerking of the cabin that remained. That fraction
of the ship received the full force of the rocket thrust. They could
decelerate it at a rate of fifteen gravities or more.

They did.

Joe lost consciousness as instantly and as peacefully as if he had been
hit on the jaw.

An unknown but brief time later, he found himself listening with a
peculiar astonishment. The rockets had burned out. They had lasted only
seconds after the separation of the ship into two fragments. Radars on
the ground are authority for this. Those few seconds were extremely
important. The cabin lost an additional half-mile per second of
velocity, which was enough to make the difference between the cabin
heating up too, and the cabin being not quite destroyed.

The cabin remnant was heavy, of course, but it was an irregular object,
some twenty feet across. It was below orbital velocity, and
wind-resistance slowed it. Even so, it traveled 47 miles to the east in
falling the last 10 miles to Earth. It hit a hillside and dug itself a
70-foot crater in the ground.

But there was nobody in it, then. A little over a month before, it had
seemed to Joe that ejection seats were the most useless of all possible
pieces of equipment to have in a space ship. He'd been as much mistaken
as anybody could be. With an ejection seat, a jet pilot can be shot out
of a plane traveling over Mach one, and live to tell about it. This
crumpling cabin fell fast, but Joe stuffed Mike in an ejection seat and
shot him out. He and the Chief dragged Haney to a seat, and then the
Chief shoved Joe off--and the four of them, one by one, were flung out
into a screaming stream of air. But the ribbon-parachutes did not burst.
They nearly broke the necks of their passengers, but they let them down
almost gently.

And it was quite preposterous, but all four landed intact. Mike, being
lightest and first to be ejected, came down by himself in a fury because
he'd been treated with special favor. The Chief and Joe landed almost
together. After a long time, Joe staggered out of his space suit and
harness and tried to help the Chief, and they held each other up as they
stumbled off together in search of Haney.

When they found him he was sleeping heavily, exhausted, in a canebrake.
He hadn't even bothered to disengage his parachute harness or take off