of the heavy blaster, mounted externally on the hull of the Prometheus.

"I'll keep the cops at a distance with a few near-misses," she said. "Maybe they aren't too anxious to take the chance of setting off the Big Pill, anyway. Let me worry about them, Bert. Just do what you've got to do...."

They had shut off their radio. There was no need to listen to the somewhat hysterical repetitions of what had come through before.

Every few moments there was a burst of humming sound as Alice fired. Bert put additional power into the rockets to surpass fixed orbital speed; but he held the ship to a tight curve around Titan. It was best to cover distance as quickly as possible. In his speeding course, he passed almost over the camp. But his purpose was to bomb a point at antipodes from it, halfway around this Saturnian moon.

nder full acceleration, the Prometheus was soon nearing this destination. To allow for the Big Pill's forward motion, imparted to it by the ship's velocity even after release, he pressed the lever that opened the bomb-bay doors, and then jabbed the single button that controlled both release, and the firing of the gigantic missile's own propulsive jets. Without those jets, considering the centrifugal force of its vast velocity in a circular path around Titan, much overbalancing the feebler gravitational pull of the moon, it could not have started its fall at all. It needed jets to drive it down.

Bert jabbed the button with his eyes closed since he had no precise target to hit. His teeth were gritted.

With the sudden loss of mass, the ship lurched. Bert had to struggle for a moment to adjust the angle of its flaming stern-jets, and bring it back on course. In another few seconds he cut the stern-jets out entirely, and opened the fore-nozzles wide to check excess speed, and reestablish the Prometheus in a stable orbit around Titan. One that could last forever without additional thrust.

"Well, the Big Pill is on its way—for better or worse," Alice remarked. "Half of our job is done."

But time had to pass before that metal colossus could drive itself and fall the thousand miles to the bleak, dried-out hills below. And the space ship hurtled on, to leave the point of coming impact far beyond the horizon. This, the Kraskows knew, was fortunate for them. The solid bulk of Titan would be the shield between them and holocaust. No human eyes could have looked 

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