already taken effect and
the lower part of his stomach tied itself in a knot.

Centrifugal force reeled him to the fringe of consciousness. He
struggled to reach the dorsal-ventral firing lever, praying that the
linkage was not severed and the mechanism was still operative. His hand
found the lever and jerked. The dorsal jet came to life with a roar. He
jockeyed the control back and forth across neutral position. The two
jets fired alternately. The sickening, end-over-end gyration became
gentler.

The ship steadied itself again into immobility. But a snap sounded from
back aft. It was followed by a grating noise that crescendoed and
culminated in a terrific crash. His ears popped. A _clang_ reverberated,
evidence of an automatic airlock sealing off another punctured section
of the vessel.

Shrugging fatigue from his body, he looked up at the panel. The
massometer showed a decrease of six tons. The explanation was simple,
Brad laughed dryly: A good one-quarter of his load of crated inter-calc
audio retention banks had rammed through the hull and floated into
space.

He glanced at the scope. The twenty odd crates, some of them taking up
an orbital relationship with the vessel, were blips on the screen.

Twisting the massometer section selector, he read off the figures. Hold
One showed full cargo of inter-calc equipment. Hold Two, with its thirty
bins of hematite, was intact. The third cargo compartment, containing
more crated inter-calc units, was the damaged one. The massometer
reading for that hold accounted for the missing weight.

* * * * *

"How're you doing, Brad?" the receiver rasped feebly. He recoiled at the
unexpected sound.

"She's still in one piece, Jim," he shouted to compensate for the
strength the signal would lose in traveling the distance to the fleeing
lifecraft. "Have you cleared through your second hyperjump yet?"

"Getting ready to go into the third. There won't be any more
communicating after that ... not with this short-range gear and your
faulty transmitter. Find out the trouble yet?"

Brad ignored the question. "How long, Jim?" His voice was eager. "How
long before you get to port?"

"Three jumps in one day. Seven more to go. That figures out to a little
over two more days. I'm making better time than we expected with this
peanut. Allow two more days for the slow tows to return.... Still think
it'll hold together?"

Brad was silent.

"Brad," Jim's