Then _bang!_ in one unreverberating explosion, and the ship bucked hard and the blurred lights came down in a rain of fiery pinwheels. The motor died with a snap. Silence rang and Ryd's stomach boiled with weightlessness; slowly his eyes could see again. _Shahrazad_ held straight on her course toward some unknown target star; the gyroscopes still whined. "Seven thousand feet a second," came Mury's voice from nowhere. "That's the speed at which we overran the meteoroid. It wouldn't have been nice if it had come through here; the armor before the control panel would have stopped it if it didn't strike higher...." Ryd fell to shuddering. He mouthed with difficulty, "My God, you don't hit meteors on purpose!" "You damned well do," said Mury crisply, "if you have to." His manner brought a sort of frightened admiration into Ryd's dark, unsteady eyes. Mury added, with apparent lack of connectedness, "Astrogators' heads don't just crack themselves on switch handles." The underdrive, roaring alive as he pressed the bottom stud on the control circle, caught Ryd's breath against his diaphragm and left him none to answer with if he had wished to. She leveled out on course with short jerky bursts from the various banks of tubes. Mury was doing all his own course-plotting now, and his teeth were sunk in his lower lip as he frowned at the charts and at the rows of figures that spun into view on the calculator. He was still correcting feverishly when the stars dimmed and space throbbed like a tympanum. A voice clanged through the strobophones. "_Shahrazad! Algol_ calling _Shahrazad_! Cut your drive to one vertical gravity. We will parallel and send a boat across. That is all." Mury's right hand moved slightly on the sloping ledge and closed the throttle. The forward thrust again collapsed into weightlessness, and the _Shahrazad_ seemed to hang motionless for a moment before the underdrive took up the load. And meanwhile the meters told their tale of the swift onrush of the great battle cruiser in whose forward sphere of exhaust gases they already flew. Across the starry sky ahead crept a vast belt of hazy light like a zodiacal glow. "The _Algol_," said Mury musingly. "A stellar dreadnaught. They aren't sparing precautions...." Abruptly he dropped his right hand from the dashboard, grasped a sheathed wire that curved away beneath the radiodetector box, and detached it with a brisk jerk. The needles dropped instantly to a uniform zero. The chain of causation was complete. * * * * * So there was no warning of the approach of the spaceboat. It bumped alongside and grappled to the towship's starboard airlock a couple of minutes later; Ryd stiffened, drew a long breath, and held it as if he would hold it forever. Mury, hand steady, depressed the studs that opened the lock ... for the second time since the ship had lifted.