nfluence had tampered with every
rivet and seam-weld in her plates.

More apprehensive than ever, Dollard finally yielded to his fears and
surrendered his controls to the robot pilot. His huge body rendered
almost weightless, he pulled himself along the rail guards of a
catwalk that led to the unmanned engine room. Here he inspected every
instrument dial to be found although the readings on many of them were
repeated on duplicates in the bow.

It was then, while the ship was still a thousand miles from the
no-pull point where free-wheeling alone had been known to carry
vessels out of Terra's gravitational range and into Venus' orbit, that
disaster struck. The fuel being fed to exactly half of the rocket
tubes choked out, and the blast from the remaining tubes increased
proportionately.

Under this new impetus, the vessel's frame shuddered. Its nose
suddenly described a wild arc among the gyrating stars. The diversion
of inertia was a more severe blow than a meteor collision would have
been. Thrust was an exceedingly difficult thing to plot in free space.
Dollard, screaming in panic, was flung against a network of metal
braces; despite his weightlessness, his mass was great as ever and a
sharp steel corner gouged a deep bleeding slash in his puffy cheek.
Sickened, he crawled forward through the spinning ship until he was
once more able to pull himself up into the pilot's chair.

There, he discovered the second battery of tubes had ceased firing
about a minute after the first. But the changed vectors had already
done their damage to both ship and heading.

* * * * *

A quick run-through on the course-calculator soon revealed to Dollard
how desperate his position was. Mathematically, Venus was now a goal
impossible to attain. To re-correct his altered heading would require
more fuel than his tanks had carried at take-off, thanks to sabotage.
He also had the vast gravitational field of the sun to battle--a
powerful sucking force, which if left to work its will could grow
insidiously from a gentle tug of a few millimeters per second to a
powerful acceleration eighty times terrestrial escape velocity--and
this, without ever once relinquishing its hold on the slightest
particle of mass in its grip.

Cursing and fuming, Dollard plotted and re-plotted, some of the
rustiness of his brain wearing off as he matched his wits against the
prospect of death by holocaust. But, all the resources of