Artie's voice went right on uninterrupted by my sour thoughts. "The present course of the ship is interception of Mars. Unless the course can be changed, the ship might plunge into Mars." So what again? They're still insured. The crew can abandon ship in the lifeboats. So the ship makes a microscopic dent in Mars. It's better than 99% wasteland. "The exact point at which impact with Mars will be made is being computed right now. What makes the whole thing terrible is that the freighter is loaded with fissionable material exported from Ganymede. If the ship is not stopped or diverted before it reaches Mars, the impact will bring all the units of fissionable material into super critical proximity." And that, I realized, will not be good for Mars because the thin atmosphere of the planet will let the ship get right through to the surface before the tough skin could get much more than cherry red. And the ship would bury itself in the soft red soil (how deep?) before the impact sandwiched the containers of fissionable material enough for detonation proximity. Whew! My interest began to increase. That was Artie Jones giving the news. He was like that, and it was not part of his regular job. He did it because he wanted to keep people up with the latest. He was Computers and Communications engineer. He finished off by saying, "Long-range scopes are looking for the ship now. As soon as it is located and magnifiers thrown into the circuit, it will be 'vised. I'll have the signals relayed to the rec room trideo. "It is, by the way, one of our own company freighters." * * * * * Alarms clanged in my head. Yowee! I raced for the rec room. Nearly everybody else was doing the same. Orrin was playing a half-hearted game of cribbage with Gus. Goil sat by himself in a corner reading. Willy was not there. Randy and Manuel were already arguing about how much fissionable a freighter like that could carry. I settled the argument by telling them exactly how much. They both whistled and shook their heads. Randy said: "If that ship buries itself deeply enough in the surface and explodes, it'll make a neat hole in Mars." I looked askance at Goil and saw that he was not reading. I said, "Hole, hell! With the tonnage they have on that ship, it'll take a chunk out of the surface the size of Australia. If it goes deep enough, it might even crack the planet wide open. It couldn't be any worse." I wasn't at all certain anything like cracking the planet would happen. Nobody could know just what sort of blast that tonnage could make. But I wanted it to sound really bad. I sneaked a quick look at Goil. He was looking pretty worried. Now, I knew our company had some real estate on Mars. A few mines, a number of atmosphere generator factories and several gravity generator plants. And just about this time I strongly suspected that Goil had some stock and other holdings in the Mars territory.