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The drive overheated and blew. The heat exchangers . . . ?"
    In
his own mind Query knew, positively, that it had not been that simple. He knew
now what had made Michaels stop him—try to stop him—the ship had been deliberately
and efficiently sabotaged. But there was nothing to gain now by telling the old
man that somebody had seized a chance to pay off old scores. There was nothing
to be gained by anything, anyhow, any time, not now. They were all dead. Query
knew that, too, with positive assurance, and the knowledge made him curiously
indifferent.
    "I don't understand." Evans
mumbled, shaking his head. "The drive couldn't blow just like that. We'd
all be dead!"
    "There
was something wrong with the heat exchangers. But we were in atmosphere. That
slowed it down a little."
    "He's
right, sir!" Lieutenant Evans rotated her seat to report. She looked stark
pale in the ghastly light but was obviously regaining something of her control.
"The heat exchangers did go wild. I saw that. I would say we are
extremely lucky to be alive. I don't quite understand how."
    "That was me." Query eyed them
curiously. "I pulled the emergency eject switch. I had to scramble over
you to do it, sir. Remember?"
    Evans put a shaky hand to his head. "I
recall something like that. Wondered what the hell you were doing. Thought
you'd gone off your head. Eject switch? I didn't even know we had one. You, Lieutenant?"
    "No, sir. I never heard of anything like that. Emergency eject ?"
    "It's an obsolete fitting, sir." Query stifled the urge to
laugh. A lecture on ship design, now? "They ceased fitting them years ago. This must be a very old ship."
    " Damnit , you're right there, Query!" Evans sat up a
little straighter in his seat. "Used to be a private
yacht. Belonged to Oberth Steinlander . Donated it to the war
drive. Good thing you spotted that. Saved our lives. We wouldn't be here now!" He snorted, then scratched his head again. "But where the hell are we, anyway?"
    "That
I don't know," Query admitted. "We're falling, and we have weight, so
it seems reasonable to assume we're on parachutes. But that's the lot."
    "What about you,
Lieutenant? Any estimates?"
    Query
turned to watch her, mildly amazed at the militarism that held their minds,
even now. Discipline! Efficiency! He wanted to laugh again.
    "It's
not easy, sir," she frowned. "Very little to go on. We were just ten miles up, the last readings I saw. It's anybody's guess how
far we were thrown by the eject , and by the blast. Or how fast we're falling, for that matter. I've no
references, sir."
    "Hmm!" The old man was reverting to pattern visibly with every passing second.
"Not out of the woods yet, eh? Bumpy landing ahead? But that's a minor matter. We're all alive and whole. Nothing
broken!" He paused to lower his brows and scowl at her. "Button up, Lieutenant!" He jabbed a finger and
she stared down at her generous exposure in sudden consternation, swiveled her
seat around and made repairs. Evans stared at Query. "It won't take long
for a search party to locate us. Just a matter of sit tight and hang on, eh?
Smart thinking on your part, Sergeant, to spot that eject system. And use it. I will see that it is duly mentioned in the right places;
you can count on that."
    "Yes, sir." Query said, but there was no heart in it. In his mind the big picture
had opened out in detail, filling in and underlining his first assumption that
they were dead already, all three. There were details that Evans didn't know,
couldn't know, nor would he understand if told, not all of them. Take the base,
for instance. So far as Step Two was concerned, the staff ship had gone away,
straight up on the beacon. That was all they could know. Radar ears could pick
up a little through that soup but not much. Enough to know
when a ship was corning in. Pos-

sibly enough to follow a ship on the way out, but
why would they bother. And even if they had, just out of curiosity, and even
if they had detected the explosion and tried