e'd gone to the place we'd aimed for. All we'd done was aim
for the wrong place. It hurts me to tell you this and I'm just attached
personnel with no space-flight tradition. In practical terms, one highly
trained crew member had punched a wrong pattern of holes on the tape.
Another equally skilled had failed to notice this when reading back. A
childish error, highly improbable; twice repeated, thus squaring the
improbability. Incredible, but that's what happened.

"Anyway, we took good care with the next lot of measurements. That's why
we were out there so long. They were cross-checked about five times. I
got sick so I climbed into a spacesuit and went outside and took some
photographs of the Sun which I hoped would help to determine hydrogen
density in the outer regions. When I got back everything was ready. We
disposed ourselves about the control room and relaxed for all we were
worth. We were all praying that this time nothing would go wrong, and
all looking forward to seeing Earth again after four months subjective
time away, except for Charley, who was still chuckling and shaking his
head, and Captain James who was glaring at Charley and obviously wishing
human dignity permitted him to tear Charley limb from limb. Then James
pressed the button.

"Everything twanged like a bowstring. I felt myself turned inside out,
passed through a small sieve, and poured back into shape. The entire bow
wall-screen was full of Earth. Something was wrong all right, and this
time it was much, much worse. We'd come out of the jump about two
hundred miles above the Pacific, pointed straight down, traveling at a
relative speed of about two thousand miles an hour.

"It was a fantastic situation. Here was the _Whale_, the most powerful
ship ever built, which could cover fifty light-years in a subjective
time of one second, and it was helpless. For, as of course you know, the
star-drive couldn't be used again for at least two hours.

"The _Whale_ also had ion rockets of course, the standard
deuterium-fusion thing with direct conversion. As again you know, this
is good for interplanetary flight because you can run it continuously
and it has extremely high exhaust velocity. But in our situation it was
no good because it has rather a low thrust. It would have taken more
time than we had to deflect us enough to avoid a smash. We had five
minutes to abandon ship.

"James got us all into the _Minnow_ at a dead run. There was no time to
take