and discipline had been dangerously lax on the Aphrodite after Harriman took over command.

At 9:05 ship time, there came the sound of a rending crash up forward, followed by a nauseating sense of shock and withering waves of motion energy transformed into heat. Fortunately, the collision was a glancing one, but enough. The Aphrodite was a shattered wreck. Her bow and the control room were carried away bodily, and only the spacetight bulkheads of the waist saved the passengers and crew from instant death.

At 9:20, feeling far off course, leaking air dangerously from sprung seams, the doomed transport and the asteroid circled each other like wary wrestlers awaiting an opening. Sooner or later, as the initial force of the spin died down, they would crash together in flaming holocaust. In the meantime, everything that could be done was being done.

Orders went out to abandon ship. Of the original complement of four hundred and eighty passengers and crew, nineteen were dead or missing, and eighty others more or less seriously injured. The heaviest casualties were among the rocket crew and officers, some of whom were fatally burned by premature atomic discharge. Rocket jets were set roaring at full capacity in a vain effort to break the wreck away from the deadly vicinity of the circling asteroid. Surviving crew members labored heroically to load and launch the lifeboats from three airlocks, two of which were so badly jammed as to be almost unworkable.

The forward compartments were a scene from inferno. Coran, who had been with Nalson in the chartroom when the crash occurred, picked himself out of the jumble of broken lockers and scattered metal-leaf charts and crawled through the glare and heat to a pitiable huddle of pulped flesh pinned beneath the wreckage of a berylium table. Nalson's skull was fractured, blood pulsed from his ears, and he was gasping out his life as Coran pried the table off him. His eyes seemed bursting from his head.

"No excuse for wreck," he got out. "I'm ... Security Police. Sent me in case you fumbled. Watch Harriman ... Hamlin."

A spurt of blood from his mouth and nose stopped his words. The navigator spat savagely. "Think ... Hamlin's ... the man you want." His lips moved weakly, then hung open as he died.

Using a leg of the ruined table as a wrecking bar, Coran pried open the door and got into the passageway. A blast of sickening heat rushed to meet him. Forward was a lurid glare of white hot 

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