Dugan was left without a job; but he was content to slump into an unused seat and think queasily of Earth thousands of miles below. He was out of his element here—but so were the others. None of them had ever been into space before; only Kane had a theoretical acquaintance with rocket navigation.

So they worked like men inspired to alter the course of the ship. It would have been utterly impossible to make all the needful calculations from the beginning; but Kane was able to work from the course already laid out and the dead navigator's correction tables, making small changes, which would mean life for millions of people and death for other millions.

Five minutes before the revised zero-time, Manning, his face like iron, shut off the engines. There must be no expanding rocket gases to interfere with the dust's dispersion. The sudden silence and weightlessness were like a bad dream. Dugan gulped, floated into a corner and was sick. Even Kane's face looked green under the unchanged light of the control room. But Vzryvov had broken the swastika seal on the black box and eyed the switch inside it greedily, between frequent glances at the clock.

With the second-hand sweeping into the last minute, he grasped the plastic handle, and at forty-five seconds pulled down. Instantly the stifling silence of the ship was broken by a muffled roar. The dust—not dust really, but exceedingly fine shot, heavy enough that it would not be carried away by winds in Earth's atmosphere—was being flung into space through many nozzles in the Siegfried's hull.

"That's that," said Kane in a flat voice.

Vzryvov swung about in his seat, facing the others, but he did not look at them. His eyes were far away and his teeth bared in a ferocious grin as he listened to the escaping storm of death.

"Dostalos' sukinym synam," he muttered to himself. "Za Ameriku i za Rossiyu!"

Manning said nothing.

They suffered through ten minutes of weightlessness while the dust was discharging, and waited another ten before they dared start the engines again and swing the ship—careless now of fine points of navigation—on a great arc toward Earth.

"It'll be forty hours, plus or minus, before the stuff hits the atmosphere," said Kane. "The Germans are going to realize something is wrong before then—pretty soon, I imagine, because every observatory will be watching the 

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