Pell's body weighed over two and a half tons! His eyes weighed five pounds each and thrust agonizingly against their liquid cushion transparent stops. The converter screamed its super-sonic thunder, setting the separate members of the ship's body to vibrating madly. Every moment was red-hazed agony of an eon's duration; every second a year of exquisite pain. The blue-green disc of Centauri V expanded visibly in the screen. Even through the observation shield Pell could make out its crescent. The brake jets were doing their work--but it would be a near thing--a very near thing. Pell prayed that there would be no more fighters; aside from the fact that he couldn't maneuver, he could still less afford to lose the time. When the ball of Centaura puffed over all the screen and its edges were no longer visible, Pell broadcast the prearranged signal of recognition to the planet-mounted blaster batteries below. Scrambled almost beyond analysis and recognition, the acknowledging signal came back. Suddenly Pell realized that Centaura's curvature had ballooned to flatness and on the heels of that realization came the whispering, high-pitched wail of a ship travelling at high velocity in thin atmosphere. Rapidly the wail became an ear-shattering, sustained screech and the small warning lights of the hull thermometers began to glow redly. Nose _outward_, rather than pointed _down_, Pell continued to brake the ship with all forward thrust, depending upon the planet's attraction to prevent him from hurtling off into space on a tangent and into the jaws of the DIC fleet. Pell never remembered how many times he blacked out, nor how many revolutions of the planet he made. Shaking the ever encroaching blackness from the borders of his vision, Pell had a fleeting memory of a heavily-forested mountain flashing by beneath, followed by a fertile plateau, a river, then mountains rising ahead. Streaking over these with a cushion of fire thrust before it, the ship hurtled at a visibly slower pace down a rocky gorge with jagged mountains on each side. Then, decelerated almost to a stop, the battered space ship seemed to poise for an instant, then turned over gently and gouged a deep furrow in the soft ground. For perhaps 400 yards it smashed through low timber and came to a halt at the brink of a small stream where the scream of rending metal finally died away. The last thing Pell remembered was cutting out the converter. IV Pell was first conscious of time--a duration between the recurring sequence of pain jags. Gradually the pain left him to be transformed into a dull ache which encompassed his whole body. Every separate nerve end seemed to shoot subtle, rapid messages to his cortex, announcing that they were not feeling well.