After that one instant of shocked inaction he went into ultra-speed action; kicking in the little vessel’s all-out eight-G drive and whirling her around as only a flitter or a speedster can whirl; only to see in his plate the vortex opening up like a bell-flower, or like a sun going nova. Cloud’s forebodings were more than materialized then, for it was not only the bomb that was going off. The staggeringly immense energy of the vortex was merging with that of the detonating duodec to form an utterly indescribable explosion. In part the flood of incandescent lava in the pit was beaten downward by the sheer, stupendous force of the blow; in part it was hurled abroad in masses, gouts, and streamers. And the raging blast of the explosion’s front seized the fragments and tore and worried them to bits, hurling them still faster along their paths of violence. And air, so densely compressed as to act like a solid, smote the walls of the crater. Those walls crumbled, crushed outward through the hard-packed ground, broke up into jaggedly irregular blocks which hurtled screamingly in all directions. The blast-wave or explosion front buffeted the flyer while she was still partially inert and while Cloud was almost blacked out and physically helpless from the frightful linear and angular accelerations. The impact broke his left arm and his right leg; the only parts of his body not pressure-packed. Then, milliseconds later, the debris began to arrive. Chunks of solid or semi-molten rock slammed against the hull, knocking off wings and control-surfaces. Gobs of viscous slag slapped it liquidly, freezing into and clogging up jets and orifices. The little ship was knocked hither and thither by forces she could no more resist than can a floating leaf resist a cataract; Cloud’s brain was addled as an egg by the vicious concussions which were hitting him so nearly simultaneously from so many different directions. The concussions and the sluggings lightened . . . stopped . . . a vast peace descended, blanket-wise. The flitter was free—was riding effortlessly away on the outermost, most tenuous fringes of the storm! Cloud wanted to faint, then, but he didn’t—quite. With one arm and leg and what few cells of his brain were still in working order, he was still in the fight. It did not even occur to him, until long afterward, that he was not going to make any effort whatever to avoid death. Foggily, he tried to look at the crater. Nine-tenths of his visiplates were dead, but he finally got a view. Good—it was out. He wasn’t surprised—he knew it would be. His next effort was to locate the secondary observatory, where he would have to land; and in that, too, he was successful. He had enough intelligence left to realize that, with practically all of his jets clogged and his wings and tail shot off, he couldn’t land his flitter inert. He’d _have_ to land her free.