The rocket from remoteness—the megaton-bomb guided missile—came smoking furiously from the stars. Calhoun seemed to throw his ship into a collision course. The rocket swerved to avoid him, though guided from many thousands of miles away. There was a trivial time-lag, too, between the time its scanners picked up a picture and transmitted it, and the transmission reached the Phaedrian fleet and the controlling impulses reached the missile in response. Calhoun counted on that. He had to. But he wasn't trying for a collision. He was forcing evasive action. He secured it. The rocket slanted itself to dart aside, and Calhoun threw the Med ship into a flip-flop and—it was a hair-raising thing—slashed the rocket lengthwise with his rocket flame. That flame was less than half an inch thick, but it was of the temperature of the surface of a star, and in emptiness it was some hundreds of yards long. It sliced the rocket neatly. It flamed hideously, and even so far, Calhoun felt a cushioned impact from the flame. But that was the missile's rocket fuel. An atom bomb is the one known kind of bomb which will not be exploded by being sliced in half.

The fragments of the guided missile went on toward the planet, but they were harmless.

"All right!" said the spacephone icily—but Calhoun thought there was relief in the voice. "You've only delayed our landing and lost a good many lives to disease!"

Calhoun swallowed something he suspected was his heart, come up into his throat.

"Now," he said, "we'll see if that's true!"

His ship had lost its spaceward velocity before it met the missile. Now it was gaining velocity toward the planet. He cut off the rocket to observe. He swung the hull about and gave a couple of short rocket blasts.

"I'd better get economical," he told Murgatroyd. "Rocket fuel is hard to come by, this far out in space. If I don't watch out, we'll be caught in orbit, here, with no way to get down! I don't think the local inhabitants would be inclined to help us."

His lateral dash at the missile had given him something close to orbital speed relative to the planet's surface, though. The Med ship went floating, with seemingly infinite leisure, around the vast bulge of the embattled world. In less than half an hour it was deep in the blackness of Canis' nighttime shadow. In three-quarters of an hour it came out again at the sunrise edge, barely four hundred miles high.

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