The operation was repeated on Tube 2, and then Pilot Greenland said: "Fade-back beginning. Power diminishing on 1 and 3, increasing on 2 and 4. Power equalized, acceleration 2-G as before. Deviation from norm: two-tenths-G." Hadley grinned at the crew. "You'd think that Greenland did all that himself, the way he talks. If it weren't for autopilots, we'd have been all over the sky." Tom Bennington laughed. He was an old-timer, and he said in a reminiscent tone: "I remember when we used to do that on manual. There were as many cases of _mal de void_ during cathode change as during turnover. Autopilots are the nuts--look! We're about to swing right now, and I'll bet a fiver that the folks below won't know a thing about it." A coincidence of mammoth proportions occurred at precisely that instant. It was a probability that made the chance of drawing a royal flush look like the chances of tomorrow coming on time. It was, in fact, one of those things that they said couldn't possibly happen, which went to prove only how wrong they were. It hadn't happened yet and probably wouldn't happen again for a million million years, but it did happen once. Turnover was about to start. A relay circuit that coupled the meteor-spotter to the autopilot froze for a bare instant, and the coincidence happened between the freezing of the relay contacts and the closing of another relay whose purpose it was to shunt the coupler circuits through another line in case of relay failure. In the inconceivable short time between the failure and the device that corrected failure, the _Solar Queen_ hit a meteor head on. It is of such coincidences that great tragedies and great victories are born. * * * * * The meteor, a small one as cosmic objects go, passed in through the broad observation dome at the top of the ship. Unhampered, it zipped through the central well of the _Solar Queen_ and passed out through the pilot's greenhouse at the bottom of the ship. Its speed was nothing worth noting; a scant twenty miles per second almost sunward. But the eleven hundred miles per second of the _Solar Queen_ made the passage of the meteor through the six hundred feet of the ship's length of less duration than the fastest camera shutter. In those microseconds, the meteor did much damage. It passed through the main pilotroom cable and scrambled those circuits which it did not break entirely. It tore the elevator system from its moorings. It entered as a small hole in the observation dome and left taking the entire pilot's greenhouse and all of the complex paraphernalia with it. The lines to the driver tubes were scrambled, and the ship shuddered and drove forward at 10-G. An inertia switch tried to function, but the resetting solenoid had become shorted across the main battery and the weight could not drop. Air doors clanged shut, closing the central well from the rest of the ship and effectively sealing the well from the crew.