His numbing fingers threw it. There was a roar, so fierce that it seemed an explosion. He'd reached the switch which made effective the discharge-circuit of his Duhanne cells. He'd thrown it. It was designed to let the little ship's overdrive power-reserve flow into storage at Headquarters on return from duty. Now, though, it poured into the landing-grid field outside. It amounted to hundreds of millions of kilowatt hours, delivered in the fraction of a second. There was the smell of ozone. The sound was like a thunder clap. But abruptly there was a strange and incredible peace. The lights came on waveringly as his shaking fingers restored the circuit-breakers. Murgatroyd shrilled indignantly, clinging desperately to an instrument rack. But the vision screens did not light again. Calhoun swore. Swiftly, he threw more circuit-restorers. The nearest-object indicator told of the presence of Maris III at forty-odd thousand miles. The hull-temperature indicator was up some fifty-six degrees. The internal-gravity field came on, faintly, and then built up to normal. But the screens would not light. They were permanently dead. Calhoun raged for seconds. Then he got hold of himself. "_Chee-chee-chee!_" chattered Murgatroyd desperately. "_Chee-chee!_" "Shut up!" growled Calhoun. "Some bright lad aground thought up a new way to commit murder. Damned near got away with it, too! He figured he'd shake us to death like a dog does a rat, only he was using a landing-grid field to do it with! Right now, I hope I fried him!" But it was not likely. Such quantities of power as are used to handle twenty-thousand-ton space liners are not controlled direct, but by relays. The power Calhoun had flung into the grid field should have blown out the grid's transformers with a spectacular display of fireworks, but it was hardly probable it had gotten back to the individual at the controls. "But I suspect," observed Calhoun vengefully, "that he'll consider this business an unfavorable occurrence! Somebody'll twist his tail, too, either for trying what he did or for not getting away with it! Only, as a matter of pure precaution--" His expression changed suddenly. He'd been trying not to think of the consequences of having no sight of the cosmos outside the ship. Now he remembered the electron telescope. It had not been in circuit, so it could not have been burned out like his vision screens. He switched it on. A star field appeared over his head. "_Chee-chee!_" cried Murgatroyd hysterically. Calhoun glanced at him. The jerking of the ship had shifted the instruments in the rack to which Murgatroyd clung. Clipped into place though they were, they'd caught Murgatroyd's tail and pinched it tightly. "You'll have to wait," snapped Calhoun. "Right now I've got to make us look like a successful accident. Otherwise whoever tried to spread us all over the cabin walls will try something else!"