Under this new impetus, the vessel's frame shuddered. Its nose suddenly described a wild arc among the gyrating stars. The diversion of inertia was a more severe blow than a meteor collision would have been. Thrust was an exceedingly difficult thing to plot in free space. Dollard, screaming in panic, was flung against a network of metal braces; despite his weightlessness, his mass was great as ever and a sharp steel corner gouged a deep bleeding slash in his puffy cheek. Sickened, he crawled forward through the spinning ship until he was once more able to pull himself up into the pilot's chair. There, he discovered the second battery of tubes had ceased firing about a minute after the first. But the changed vectors had already done their damage to both ship and heading. * * * * * A quick run-through on the course-calculator soon revealed to Dollard how desperate his position was. Mathematically, Venus was now a goal impossible to attain. To re-correct his altered heading would require more fuel than his tanks had carried at take-off, thanks to sabotage. He also had the vast gravitational field of the sun to battle--a powerful sucking force, which if left to work its will could grow insidiously from a gentle tug of a few millimeters per second to a powerful acceleration eighty times terrestrial escape velocity--and this, without ever once relinquishing its hold on the slightest particle of mass in its grip. Cursing and fuming, Dollard plotted and re-plotted, some of the rustiness of his brain wearing off as he matched his wits against the prospect of death by holocaust. But, all the resources of higher mathematics failed to point toward a solution. An artery commenced to throb painfully above his ear. It was Garth who had engineered this hideous accident, he told himself. The faithful unsuspecting Garth had turned out to be a traitor. He was the one who had rigged the fuel lines so that at a certain predicted point along the course the flow along one set of conduits would be shunted to the other. He should have killed Garth instead of merely stunning him, Dollard thought angrily. For the twentieth time, he fed three-body calculations into the astro-computer. Somehow, somewhere, in the maze of the Newtonian science there had to be an answer. The complexities of force and heading analysis weren't so great but what machinery could eventually solve all the variables involved. That is, if only Sol's overwhelming gravitational attraction didn't provide a free-sliding path to hell with no choice of alternates in the meanwhile....