She took a baggy-looking suit and a plastic helmet out of a locker and handed it to him. The others were putting on similar suits, leaving the helmets open. Birrel said, "Why?" "In case we're hulled. If you hear the warning-horn, clap your helmet shut. _Fast._" She showed him how and then practically pushed him out of the bridge. He shuffled back to the cabin and lay down on the bunk, feeling worse than he had at any time since the beginning of this hare-brained venture. He was scared, and he didn't mind admitting it. If he had been able to do something, anything at all, it wouldn't have been so bad. But just to lie here alone in this completely incredible ship, thinking of the completely incredible but perfectly real destruction that faced him--that was something no man ought to be asked to do. He did it. He was able to sense the "feel" of the ship, and from that to gauge the variations--the slight recoil and shudder as missiles presumably were launched, the greater perturbations of what could only be the near-miss blasts of the enemy weapons. It occurred to him that what these star-folk meant by "conventional weapons" were probably not at all the simple explosive types referred to by that name on Earth. The technical problems involved in launching any kind of missile at all at light-plus speeds were so far beyond him that he didn't even try to figure them. But there was no doubt that it was being done. Every leap and jar of the ship told him that unmistakably. Even so, Birrel was not prepared for the suddenness and violence of what happened. There was a crash. He felt it physically and heard it, too, this time, transmitted by the ship's air. He fell upward against the straps as the gravitational axis of the ship was brutally reversed. The lights dimmed to an eerie blue and there was a horrible tortured howling of overtaxed generators. The ship rammed through into normal space with much the same effort as of a speeding car hitting a stone wall, only greatly magnified. Birrel heard the warning-horn start. He clapped his helmet shut, and then inertia flung him into the recoil couch as into a slab of granite and the joints of the ship began to spring around him. Then everything was dead, generators, horn, everything. The ship was silent except for one sound, the hiss of escaping air. * * * * * Stunned but still, incredibly, alive, Birrel unfastened the straps and floated out of the couch. The ship was still moving, but there was no longer any gravity field to speak of. Birrel was in free fall. He floated like a great clumsy balloon out of the cabin and toward the bridge, clawing his way while the ship bent and wavered and wobbled around him, its rigid frame gone limp. As limp as his own body felt. Currents of escaping air whirled papers, garments, pieces of equipment, bits of wreckage wildly around in the interior. He was in a panic lest his helmet be cracked or his suit torn.