big one—" IV Barnard found that space navigation was more complex than he had thought. He watched in grudging admiration as the girl rejected course after course. Finally she looked up at him and frowned. "We have to go sunward—the sun is almost directly between us and Pluto. We can get there fast, and speed is our best bet to evade the Space Police. But it'll be dangerous." "I'll take the chance," said Barnard. "But don't be reckless with your own life. How many months will it take?" "About four days." He stared suspiciously at her. "It took me fourteen days from Earth to Mars. What's this crate got that the Inner Planets Line hasn't?" She smiled. "For a great reporter, you don't know much. They could make the Earth-Mars run in a day—but that's where the danger comes in. If a rock gets in their path, they have to be traveling slow enough for the detectors to find it and change the course. That's done automatically, but we haven't powerful enough detectors yet to handle high speeds." "Oh, a job for the instrument makers?" Barnard was beginning to realize his ignorance. "You could put it that way. The chance of hitting anything big enough to hurt a space ship is small, of course, but with hundreds of ships in space, there would be a lot of wrecks if they all went as fast as we're going to go!" They plunged almost directly into the sun, nose forward to cut down the radiant energy. Gail sat in a sea of charts and tables, calling out instructions to Barnard, who was learning to handle the controls. She kept the rockets blazing, and before many hours had passed they could almost see the sun growing in size. In the growing warmth, the reporter dozed off to a restless, nightmarish sleep. He awoke with a start to find himself soggy with perspiration, his bones aching. Gail, hunched over her figures, looked up and grinned impishly. "Warm?" she asked. "The cooling units are going full blast. The vision plates are all shuttered, but if you want to look, I've swung dark glass into place." She gestured to one of the darkened vision plates, and her fingers slid to a button that opened the shutters. Barnard looked and closed his eyes when he saw the monstrous body that was the sun.
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