higher
mathematics failed to point toward a solution. An artery commenced to
throb painfully above his ear.

It was Garth who had engineered this hideous accident, he told
himself. The faithful unsuspecting Garth had turned out to be a
traitor. He was the one who had rigged the fuel lines so that at a
certain predicted point along the course the flow along one set of
conduits would be shunted to the other.

He should have killed Garth instead of merely stunning him, Dollard
thought angrily.

For the twentieth time, he fed three-body calculations into the
astro-computer. Somehow, somewhere, in the maze of the Newtonian
science there had to be an answer. The complexities of force and
heading analysis weren't so great but what machinery could eventually
solve all the variables involved. That is, if only Sol's overwhelming
gravitational attraction didn't provide a free-sliding path to hell
with no choice of alternates in the meanwhile....

The _click-click_ of the tape as it emerged from the electronic
calculator seemed to present a different rhythm to Dollard's ears on
the twenty-first try. Picking up the ribbon, he let his reddened eyes
run over the printed symbols, translating them into finished
equations. Elation suddenly sent his blood pressure soaring, as the
meaning of what he read became apparent. There was a solution ... a
course he could follow! One, which while it would not guide him to
Venus, would prevent him from plunging into the sun.

Eagerly, he punched the figures for the heading onto a magnetized wire
that would be fed into the gyropilot. After the heading was set, he
crawled toward the ship's stern, dragging with him a hydrojet welding
torch, a tool that could sear metal apart or join it by causing
regulation of the molten rod protruding from its spring barrel. In the
abdomen of the vessel, he found the wrecked fuel lines and removed the
obstruction Garth had set up, repairing the channels.

* * * * *

Returning to the pilot chamber, he pressed the firing button and
acceleration returned a form of gravity to the ship's interior, giving
him weight for the first time since the freakish accident.

Sighing with relief as the heavens slowly rotated in his screen,
Dollard slumped back in his chair. He punched new figures into the
computer, thinking ... now once safely back into a no-pull zone, a man
with a little luck should be able to make--

His chunky fingers froz