n't wait for another match, either. His screens were leaking like
sieves, and if he had waited for another chance they would have picked
him up fried to a greasy cinder in his own lard!

The bomb sped truly and struck the target in direct central impact,
exactly as scheduled. It penetrated perfectly. The neocarballoy casing
lasted just long enough--that frightful charge of duodec exploded, if
not exactly at the center of the vortex, at least near enough to the
center to do the work. In other words, Cloud's figuring had been
close--very close. But the time had been altogether too short.

The flitter was not even out of the crater when the bomb went off. And
not only the bomb. For Cloud's vague forebodings were materialized, and
more; the staggeringly immense energy of the vortex merged with that of
the detonating duodec to form an utterly incomprehensible whole.

In part the hellish flood of boiling lava in that devil's cauldron was
beaten downward into a bowl by the sheer, stupendous force of the blow;
in part it was hurled abroad in masses, in gouts and streamers. And the
raging wind of the explosion's front seized the fragments and tore and
worried them to bits, hurling them still faster along their paths of
violence. And air, so densely compressed as to be to all intents and
purposes a solid, smote the walls of the crater. Smote them so that they
crumbled, crushed outward through the hard-packed ground, broke up into
jaggedly irregular blocks which hurtled, screamingly, away through the
atmosphere.

Also the concussion wave, or the explosion front, or flying fragments,
or something, struck the two loose bombs, so that they too exploded and
added their contribution to the already stupendous concentration of
force. They were not close enough to the flitter to wreck it of
themselves, but they were close enough so that they didn't do her--or
her pilot--a bit of good.

The first terrific wave buffeted the flyer while Cloud's right hand was
in the air, shooting across the panel to turn on the Berg. The impact
jerked the arm downward and sidewise, both bones of the forearm snapping
as it struck the ledge. The second one, an instant later, broke his left
leg. Then the debris began to arrive.

Chunks of solid or semi-molten rock slammed against the hull, knocking
off wings and control-surfaces. Gobs of viscous slag slapped it
liquidly, freezing into and clogging up jets and orifices. The little
ship was hurled hither an