cated until the next day. He'd been shot
out of the ship's cabin earlier and higher; he was lighter, and he'd
floated farther.

But things--satisfying things--had happened in the interval. Sitting
almost dizzily on the bunk in the swiftly roaring plane while blood
began sluggishly to flow through his body, Joe remembered the gleeful,
unofficial news passed around on the destroyers. They waited for Mike to
be brought in. But they rejoiced vengefully.

The report was quite true, but it never reached the newspapers. Nobody
would ever admit it, but the rockets aimed at the returning space ships
had been spotted by Navy radar as they went up from the Arabian Sea. And
the ships of the radar patrol couldn't do anything about the rockets,
but they could and did converge savagely upon the places from which they
had been launched. Planes sped out to spot and bomb. Destroyers arrived.

Somewhere there was a navy department that could write off two modern
submarines with rocket-launching equipment, last heard from west of
India. American naval men would profess bland ignorance of any such
event, but there were acres of dead fish floating on the ocean where
depth-bombs had hunted down and killed two shapes much too big to be
fish, which didn't float when they were killed and which would never
report back how they'd destroyed two space ships. There'd be seagulls
feasting over that area, and there'd be vague tales about the happening
in the bazaars of Hadhramaut. But nobody would ever admit knowing
anything for certain.

But Joe knew. He got to his feet, wobbling a little bit in the soaring
plane. He ached everywhere. His muscles protested the strain of holding
him erect. He held fast, summoning strength. Before his little ship
broke up he'd been shaken intolerably, and his body had weighed half a
ton. Where his safety-belt had held him, his body was one wide bruise.
There'd been that killing acceleration when the ship split in two. The
others--except Mike--were in as bad a case or worse. Haney and the Chief
were like men who'd been rolled down Mount Everest in a barrel. All of
them had slept for fourteen hours straight before they even woke up for
food. Even now, Joe didn't remember boarding this plane or getting into
the bunk. He'd probably been carried in.

Joe stood up, doggedly, until enough strength came to him to justify his
sitting down again. He began to dress. It was astonishing how many
places about his body were sore