"The _Whale_ also had ion rockets of course, the standard deuterium-fusion thing with direct conversion. As again you know, this is good for interplanetary flight because you can run it continuously and it has extremely high exhaust velocity. But in our situation it was no good because it has rather a low thrust. It would have taken more time than we had to deflect us enough to avoid a smash. We had five minutes to abandon ship. "James got us all into the _Minnow_ at a dead run. There was no time to take anything at all except the clothes we stood in. The _Minnow_ was meant for short heavy hops to planets or asteroids. In addition to the ion drive it had emergency atomic rockets, using steam for reaction mass. We thanked God for that when Cazamian canceled our downwards velocity with them in a few seconds. We curved away up over China and from about fifty miles high we saw the _Whale_ hit the Pacific. Six hundred tons of mass at well over two thousand miles an hour make an almighty splash. By now you'll have divers down, but I doubt they'll salvage much you can use. "I wonder why James went down with the ship, as the saying is? Not that it made any difference. It must have broken his heart to know that his lovely ship was getting the chopper. Or did he suspect another human error? "We didn't have time to think about that, or even to get the radio working. The steam rockets blew up. Poor Cazamian was burnt to a crisp. Only thing that saved me was the spacesuit I was still wearing. I snapped the face plate down because the cabin was filling with fumes. I saw Charley coming out of the toilet--that's how he'd escaped--and I saw him beginning to laugh. Then the port side collapsed and I fell out. "I saw the launch spinning away, glowing red against a purplish black sky. I tumbled head over heels towards the huge curved shield of earth fifty miles below. I shut my eyes and that's about all I remember. I don't see how any of us could have survived. I think we're all dead. "I'll have to get up and crack this suit and let some air in. But I can't. I fell fifty miles without a parachute. I'm dead so I can't stand up." * * * * * There was silence for a while except for the vicious howl of the wind. Then snow began to shift on the ledge. A man crawled stiffly out and came shakily to his feet. He moved slowly around for some time. After about two hours he returned to the hollow, squatted down and switched on the recorder. The voice began again, considerably wearier.