would simply flip over as she ran,
making her path a slightly skewed, elongated S-curve--a sort of
orbital hiccup.

[Illustration]

Except that she never quite made it through the hiccup. The ship was
almost perpendicular to her line of flight when she was sideswiped.

Her meteor detectors hadn't failed; they were still functioning
perfectly. But meteor detectors are built to look for solid chunks of
metal and rock--not thin, porous bits of cloth.

The rag had traveled a good many millions of miles since it had been
cast overboard; it was moving sunward with almost the same velocity
with which the _Persephone_ was moving Plutowards. The combined
velocities were such that, if it had hit the _Persephone_ dead on, it
would have delivered close to seventeen thousand kilowatt-hours of
energy in one grand burst of incandescence.

Fortunately, the tip of the rag merely gave the ship a slap on the
tail as it passed. The plastic meteor-bumper wasn't built to take that
sort of thing. The plastic became an expanding cloud of furiously
incandescent gas in a small fraction of a second, but the velocity of
that bit of rag was so great that the gas acted as a solid block of
superheated fury as it leaped across the hundred feet of vacuum which
separated the bumper hull from the inner hull.

A rocket-driven missile carrying a shaped-charge warhead weighing
several hundred pounds might have done almost as much damage.

* * * * *

Jayjay Kelvin moved his arms to pick himself up off the floor and
found that there was no necessity for doing so. He was floating in the
air of the lounge, and, strictly speaking, there was no floor anyway.
He opened his eyes and saw that that which had been the floor was now
just another wall, except that it had chairs bolted to it. It rose on
his left, reached the zenith, and set on his right, to be replaced by
another wall, and then by what had been the ceiling. The second time
the floor came round, Jayjay began to wonder whether he was spinning
around his longitudinal axis or whether the ship was actually rotating
about him. He closed his eyes again.

He didn't feel more than a little dizzy, but he couldn't be sure
whether the dizziness was caused by his spinning or the blow on his
head. He opened his eyes again and grabbed at the book that was
orbiting nearby, then hurled it as hard as he could toward the
sometime ceiling. "The Pride of the Pecos" zoomed rapidly in