Three hours later we had bid an enthusiastic good-bye to that mushy ball of swamp and stench those poor colonials called home, and the valves sighed shut in the _Eagle's_ flanks. The loading cranes pulled away and our own were retracted. The ramp was cleared and the lift-ship alarm blared through the _Eagle_. The gyros reached operating RPM and I let my hands play over the consoles. The boat shuddered and lifted slowly on a tail of fire. I fed her more power and the accelerometer moved up to 2G. I held her there until we broke out of the clouds and into the crystalline cobalt of the ionosphere. I swung the power lever over and the _Eagle_ leaped upward, her needle-nose pointed for home. We were well past turn-over, in fact just about nineteen hours from Earth when things began happening. Bat called Control, his voice tense with excitement. "Morley! There's something coming ... fast! I can feel it!" I started to ask him what was coming in fast, and whether or not he could "see" it clearly through the metal of the ship, but I never finished. UVR flashed a red alert warning on my control panel ... and it was the last warning it ever gave. The panel screeched: "METEOR SWARM!" and went dead. The lights flickered and went out as the _Eagle_ bucked and roared in protest. The sound of tearing metal knifed through the hull, and then the whooshing sound of escaping air. Alarm bells clattered futilely--bulkheads slammed. The ship's self-sealing mesoderm saved most of the air, but not before the pressure in the boat dropped from 14.7 down to 6 lbs. per square inch in about two seconds and doubled me up in an agony of aero-embolism. For a long while there was silence, and I fought the glittering knives of pain that seemed to be cutting me into hamburger. Then the lights came back on, dimly. There was still life in the old _Eagle_. I staggered to my feet and rang the tuberoom. A pilot's first instinct is to check the power. No matter what has happened to his ship, if there's power there's hope. "Morley...!" It was Bat calling back through the interphone. "We've had it down here! The sheathing is gone and I've got three men killed!" I could hear the sound of metal sizzling in the background as Bat looked about for more dope to pass on. As it was it looked bad enough. If the sheathing was shot, that meant that he was taking lethal doses of radiation even as he spoke to me. "Bat!" I shouted, "Bat, you crazy fool! If that place is hot, get out of there!" I got no reply. "Bat! That's an order! Put the pile on automatic and get the hell out!" "No soap, Morley...." Bat's voice seemed edged with pain. "You know the autos won't last for more than thirty minutes. Strictly ... emergency stuff...." And then his voice grew even tighter. "The storage, Morley! Those stinking ... rocks ... took ... out ... the storage! All the thorium went out ... the side ... they hit ... the storage bunker!"