“Steady, Rob,” Lieutenant Swenson spoke in a dramatic whisper. “A few minutes more—twelve—nine—” The compartment was silent as a tomb except for the soft throb of the ship’s power plant. Rob’s eyes drifted out the side port, and the stars out there dazzled him. “Three—two—one—_fire_!” Rob’s hand shoved forward. A muted rumble came from the floor. The noise swelled to a full-bodied roar. Then there was a banshee-like scream, and Rob knew the first bomb had flung itself into space. Lieutenant Swenson counted off five more seconds, and then Rob sent the second bomb on its way. This happened four more times, and each time Rob heard the final shriek as the missile cast itself into the vacuum. Rob didn’t hear the last bomb scream. His ears were ringing too much from the clamor of the previous ones. When it was all over, the purr of the power plant began dissipating the throbbing ring in Rob’s ears. He felt a tremendous relief now that the job was done. “How long before we’ll see the bursts?” he asked Lieutenant Swenson. “Not for hours,” was the reply. “Don’t forget, the missiles have a long way to go even though they’re speeding fast as blazes.” “Then we won’t know until then whether we’re successful?” Harry asked. “That’s right,” the navigator said. Rob checked the compartment cosmic-ray counter and his own pencil meter. “The radiation ought to start diminishing now that the load is gone,” he said. He was mistaken, he discovered later, when the ship had been swung about on its gyros and was heading homeward. The radiation had begun increasing, in fact. “I don’t understand it,” Rob said worriedly. “There’s nothing down below to make the radiation concentration rise. If this keeps up, we won’t last out the trip back.” Minutes later, as the concentration continued to build up, Rob knew there had to be something down there that was giving off the dangerous emanations. There was no other explanation that he could think of. “Bruce,” Rob said to the new mechanic, “can you check the bomb chamber without direct exposure?” The mechanic nodded. “There’s an antiradiation compartment up forward with an insulated window where I can take a look at it.” As Bruce left the room to check, Rob thought of something. “Did any of you hear the scream of that last bomb leaving the chamber?” he asked. When no one said anything, he continued, “I think I’ve got the answer. That last bomb must have jammed and didn’t come out.” His guess proved substantially correct. When Bruce returned, he reported that the heat of the bomb racing along its launching track had fused with part of the track so that both hung out of the bomb hatch and were being carried along with the ship. “We’re lucky those bombs were made to go off only on contact with the powerful omega rays in the R-cloud,” Rob spoke grimly, “or we’d be somewhere up in the Milky Way by now! We’ve got to get that bomb away from the ship before its radiation kills us.”