"They're coming in close now. Keith, this is it!"

Keith nestled into the ordnance chair like a bird. His body was tight with anticipated pleasure. His fingers hooked, spread, began to tremble individually. Death was there, all around.

Without looking up, seemingly without reason, he asked, "You were engaged to marry a very pretty girl when the war ended, weren't you, Captain? Someone named Mara?"

Danton hadn't forgotten. "That's right. I couldn't explain it to her—why I wouldn't be reconditioned. She married someone else. A cybernetics engineer, named George."

"The hell with them, all of them!" Keith said. "You wouldn't want to go back there. That's what they all think about us, Captain. While they need us we're great guys, and afterwards—don't touch. No, Captain, whether this is delusion or the real thing, this is how we were meant to go. We're lucky, Captain!"

Keith manipulated the ordnance keys. Danton's eyes went blind before the incredible flash of kinetic energy release. His eyes closed. Music, lifting, whirling round and round and he was rocking with gentle joyous softness in a cradle of death....

But Danton got his hands up against the darkness, held on to it, pushed it this way and that, got it away from his eyes. He crawled back into the chair, blinked into the viewer. He didn't see the ships now, anywhere. Only the great clenched fist of the war-world, the red world, rushing up, growing with a silent onrushing fury, looming, broadening.

Keith's fingers dug into Danton's shoulder. "I got 'em, Captain! Burned them out like ants on a hot plate. They burned so beautiful...."

The ship had suffered from the repercussion; nothing responded right. Danton shoved more intensifier units into the stern tubes, straightened her a little with a couple of bursts from the steering jets, then power-dived with the tubes roaring.

He fought the controls. The numbness, the roaring, the intolerable rising temperature of the walls. Fighting for some sort of balance to get the ship hurtling in at least a low-level orbit. The walls quivered, then the whining, sighing, falling through a dense sea of twisting vapor.

Danton watched the altimeter, the power gauges, manipulated the power-tube stops. His body was an unfeeling, unconscious circuit of responses. Somehow he got the ship at vertical. The plate 

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