supplies.

Furthermore there was no truth in the oft-revived rumors of weaknesses
in the so-called "spine-and-rib" construction of the Baur and Hammond
Type Three vessel under acceleration strain. The type had been
discontinued solely because the rather complicated structure raised
certain stowage difficulties in service with overlong turnabout times
resulting.

There may have been a collision with a meteor he conceded, but, it was
thought, highly unlikely. And now, the urgent business of the search
called, the Controller escaped, perspiring gently.

Able Jake was sighted a few minutes later but it was another three hours
before a service ship could be readied and got away without load to
allow it as much operating margin as possible. Getting a man aboard was
yet another matter. At this stage of space travel no maneuver of this
nature had ever been accomplished outside of theory. Fuel-thrust-mass
ratios were still a thing of pretty close reckoning, and the service
lift ships were simply not built for it.

The ship was in an elliptical orbit and a full degree off its normal
course. A large part of the control room was demolished and there was a
lengthy split in the hull. There was no sign of the pilot and some of
the cargo was missing also. The investigating crew assumed the obvious
and gave it as their opinion that the pilot had been literally
disintegrated by the intense heat of the collision.

The larger part of the world's population made it a point to listen in
on the first space burial service in history over the absent remains of
Johnny Melland.

* * * * *

Such a small thing to cause such a fury. A mere twenty Earth pounds of
an indifferent grade of rock and a little iron, an irregular, ungraceful
lump, spawned somewhere a billion years before as a star died. But it
still had most of the awesome velocity and inertia of its birth.

Able Jake, with the controlling influence of the jets cut, had yawed
slightly and was now traveling crabwise. The meteor on its own course, a
trifle oblique to that of the ship, struck almost directly the slender
spring steel spine, the frightful energy of the impact transmuted on the
instant into a heat that vaporized several feet of the nose and spine
before the dying shock caused an anguished flexing of the ship's
backbone; thrust violently outward along the radial members and so
against the ribs and hull sheathing on that side. Able Jake's hul