jay, Smith, Hull, and
the captain were in the control room, trying not to look glum. "I wish
I knew what happened."

"Meteor," Jayjay said flatly. "The bumper hull is fused at the edges
of the break, and the direction of motion was inward."

"I don't see how it could have got by the meteor detectors," said
Smith, a lean, sad-looking man with a badly bruised face.

"I don't either," the captain said, "but it must have. If the engines
had blown, the damage would have been quite different."

Jeffry Hull nervously took a cigarette from his pocket pack. His nose
had quit bleeding, but his eye was purpling rapidly and was almost
swollen shut.

Captain Al-Amin leaned over and gently took the cigarette from Hull's
fingers. "No smoking, I'm afraid. We'll have to conserve oxygen."

"You guys are so damn _calm_!" Hull said. His voice betrayed a surface
of anger covering a substratum of fear. "Here we are, heading away
from the Solar System at eighteen million miles an hour, and you all
act as if we were going on a picnic or something."

The observation was hardly accurate. Any group of men who went on a
picnic in the frame of mind that Jayjay and the others were in would
have produced the gloomiest outing since the Noah family took a trip
in an excursion boat.

"There's nothing to worry about," Captain Al-Amin said gently. "All we
have to do is set the screamers going, and the Interplanetary Police
will pick us up."

"Screamers?" Hull looked puzzled.

Instead of answering the implied question, the captain looked at
Smith. "Have you checked them?" He knew that Smith had, but he was
trying to quiet Hull's fears.

Smith nodded. "They're O.K." He looked at Hull. "A screamer is an
emergency radio. There's one in every compartment. You've seen them."
He pointed across the room, toward a red panel in the wall. "In
there."

"But I thought it was impossible for a spaceship in flight to contact
a planet by radio," Hull objected.

"Normally, it is," Smith admitted. "It takes too much power and too
tight a beam to get much intelligence over a distance that great from
a moving ship. But the screamers are set up for emergency purposes.
They're like flares, except that they operate on microwave frequencies
instead of visible light.

"The big radio telescopes on Luna and on the Jovian satellites can
pick them up if we beam them sunward, and the Plutonian station can
pick us up if we beam in that direction."

Hull looked much