"_I asked one of the officers--that gray-haired man over there. He was plenty worried. I guess that's why he talked so freely. He'd had some kind of dispute with the captain, apparently. He told me that trouble developed aboard that freighter when it was eight or ten thousand miles away. An emergency message came through, but for some reason the captain kept it pretty much to himself._" Watching the freighter's hull blaze with friction as it went into a narrow orbit about Earth, Corriston tried hard to make himself believe that the particular manner of a spaceman's departure was simply one, tragic aspect of a calculated risk, that men who lived dangerously could hardly expect to die peacefully in their beds. But it was a rationalization without substance. In an immediate and very real sense he was inside the freighter, enduring an eternity of torment, sharing the agonizing fate that was about to overtake the crew. Nearer and nearer to Earth the freighter swept, completely encircling the planet like a runaway moon with an orbital velocity so great the eye could hardly follow it. "It will blast out a meteor pit as wide as the Grand Canyon if it explodes on land," someone at Corriston's elbow said. "I wouldn't care to be within a hundred miles of it." "Neither would I. It could wipe out a city, all right--any city within a radius of thirty miles. This is _really_ something to watch!" The freighter had encircled Earth twice and was now so close to its blue-green oceans and the dun-colored immensity of its continental land masses that it had almost disappeared from view. It had dwindled to a tiny, glowing pinpoint of radiance crossing the face of the planet, an erratically weaving firefly that had abandoned all hope of guiding itself by a light that was about to flare up with explosive violence and put an end to its life. The freighter was invisible when the end came. It was invisible when it struck and rebounded and channeled a deep pit in a green valley on Earth. But the explosion which followed was seen by every man and woman on the Station's wide-view promenade. There were three tremendous flares, each opening and spreading outward like the sides of a funnel, each a livid burst of incandescence spiraling outward into space. As seen from the Station the flares were not, of course, so tragically spectacular. They resembled more successive flashes of almost instantaneous brightness, flashes such as had many times been produced by the tilting of a heliograph on the rust-red plains of Mars under conditions of maximum visibility. It takes an experienced eye to interpret such phenomena correctly, and among the spectators on the promenade there were a few, no doubt, who were not even quite sure that the freighter _had_ exploded. But Corriston had no doubts at all on that score. The full extent of the tragedy would be revealed later by radio communication from Earth.