Just when you think you've seen everything, and you think that nothing can get any weirder or worse, the Universe senses this and throws you a complete curve. We had been in orbit over the Explorer for five days. We had downloaded every bit of every log ever recorded by the Explorer and all members of her crew. We had sent all this data home on the gigabyte data stream, but Deep Star wouldn't even see our report for a couple of days. Any answer Deep Star might have for us would be weeks away. Actually, it probably was a waste of time to send the data back. I know there are some smart guys at Deep Star, but they're not so much smarter than us that they can figure out the unexplainable any better than we could.

We had therefore re-trained our attentions on Survivor Number 1. Greer, Sarco, Jones, and Hasbrough were still immobile at SN1. Hasbrough continued to be the most desperate, with medical telemetry that hovered just on the other side of death. He was exothermic and comatose in an endorphin holiday.

George's voice pounded over the intercom, waking me out of what passed for sleep these days. "Emergency meeting. Come NOW!"

I rushed to push my floating body into the control room, still pulling one pant leg over my left arm. (The phrase "Sartorial Splendor" has never been used as an adjective in my presence.) George and Janet were already there. I presume they had been talking about me, since they shut up as soon as I had arrived.

Janet said angrily once I had taken my place at the table, "Chief, I thought I asked you to program Mother to inform us of any changes at SN1?"

"Huh," I answered. I always sound so intelligent when I don't know what the heck is going on. "What are you talking about?"

"Hasbrough and Greer are both dead," George said. "And all hell has broken loose at SN1. It looks like there's been a tornado or something. It happened last night. The Lookout caught the beginning of it, then slipped out of orbital range just when we might have learned something."

"Well, didn't Mother see anything?" I asked. "We're directly overhead. Mother should have seen the whole thing even when the Lookout was out of range."

"I think 'should' is the apropos word here, Chief," Janet said. "I asked Mother, and she said she had not been instructed to watch SN1. Didn't you program her like we all had discussed?"

"Of course I did," I said angrily, then paused. "I'm pretty sure I did. I don't remember . . ." I stopped. I couldn't actually remember telling Mother to watch our guys. I guess I figured she was smart enough to monitor it on her own. "I guess I forgot with all the other stuff going on," I said. "What else do we know about SN1?"

"Not much," Janet answered. "Hasbrough and Greer are dead, and their bodies are gone."

"What?" I bellowed. "What do you mean gone?"

"Just what I said," Janet answered, her captain's calculated anger replacing the real anger she had felt just a few seconds before. "The medical telemetry units are nearby. Both units are reporting redlines. But we can't find any trace of Greer or Hasbrough. Their bodies are gone. Here, look at the photos yourself."

It was somebody else's arm that reached out and took the photos from Janet. That foreign arm held them on the table in front of me, but my eyes weren't focusing too well at the moment, so I didn't really see them. My entire system seemed to have shut down. I couldn't see, I couldn't think, and I'm not sure if I was even breathing. And then, as if things weren't bad enough already, I began to feel my amnesia slipping away . . .

The ship was coming in fast on the asteroid. Density measurements had marked it as a prime mining candidate. The skipper called back to the engine room on the intercom, "Keep a sharp eye, Chief. We'll need full power to reduce our Delta-V when we get close to this puppy."

"Aye-aye, Skipper," the Chief replied. Then he turned to the engineer's mate and said, "I'll show you a little trick, kid. This one isn't in the book. If you ever tell anyone about it, I'll deny it on my mother's grave and call you the damnest liar this side of the Proxima sector."

The mate grinned and nodded, while the Chief removed an access door from the control panel. "The trick," he told the younger man, "is to bypass the fusion reaction damper control, then dampen the reaction manually."

"Doesn't that make it kind of unstable?" the younger man asked. "I always thought it needed to be over-dampened because otherwise it was possible to flame-out the ion stream."

"A bit less stable, perhaps," conceded the Chief. "But it lets us increase reactor power by about twenty percent, and it lets us modulate the output a lot faster. Remember, these things are built with a colossal safety factor. If I dampen the reaction by hand, we can go from dead idle to full-plus power in half the normal time. Relax, I've done this dozens of times. Also, remember, the faster we come to the asteroid, the quicker we'll get our business done, and the faster we'll make our share. There's a bar at Baikonur that I want to show you as soon as we get back." This bar talk was bluster, as they both knew, but it was how space rats were supposed to talk, so they all cultivated the image, no matter how absurd it was.

The Chief had unbolted the damper control just as the annunciator called for full retro thrust. Instead of allowing the engine to respond, the Chief held the manual over-ride. The ion jet remained quiescent instead of gradually rising to life as the Skipper had expected. A few seconds later, the Skipper called on the intercom, "Hey Chief, what's going on. We need full thrust, or we're going to blast into the big bird otherwise. Gimme the power, for Christ's sake."

"Slight problem here, Skipper," the Chief lied. "We'll get you power in a second. Hang on though, since it may get a bit rough."

"Don't give me that shit Chief. Gimme the power now!"

"This is no shit, Skipper. But I'll get it for you in a second. Just hold on."

The Chief and his mate watched the navigation screen monitor as it recorded the rapidly approaching asteroid. When even the mate had gotten frightened that a collision was inevitable, the Chief released the override control and the ion jet roared to life. Instead of a gentle, slowly increasing thrust, the power output jumped off the scale almost instantly. The Chief ran his nimble fingers expertly over the controls, making small adjustments to manually modulate the reaction which generated the ion thrust that began to slow them.

The ship shuddered in the g forces created as the ion jet thrust reduced the velocity difference between the ship and the asteroid. The navigation radar screen showed the ship slowing markedly. The mate was just about to relax when a loud gong sounded and red lights lit up the control panel. The g force created by the ion jet wavered, then abruptly ended, spilling everything in the room into zero-g chaos. Instantly, the intercom came on. "Chief, what the hell is going on? Give me thrust. We're twenty seconds away from impact!"

"Ion's down, Skipper!" shouted the Chief as he frantically tried to relight the jet and get the genie back into the bottle. "You'd better give us full side thrusters. Maybe we can skim the side of the--"

The side thrusters cut in and the collision klaxon sounded before the Chief could complete his suggestion. The Skipper made a desperate attempt to alter the ship's trajectory around the asteroid. Since he could not slow sufficiently to prevent impact, perhaps he could steer around the asteroid and avoid the impact entirely. The side thrusters created a pseudo gravity ninety degrees from normal, and pushed the Chief and his mate against the side bulkhead instead of the floor panel. "Ten seconds to impact!" shouted a voice over the ship-wide intercom. Feverishly, the Chief crawled in the newly created "upward" direction against the g field to the control panel. His hands were a blur as he worked the panel. The ion jet sputtered, coughed, then roared back to life just as the ship impacted the asteroid.

"The telemetry units are old," I said, almost shouting. "They've been sitting out on Harvey's World for almost a year. They're probably malfunctioning. The redlines are wrong!" My mind wasn't working so clearly at the moment, so I couldn't explain very well to George why I knew his medical telemetry readings were nonsense. I was sure that our guys were not dead. Too many people had died on Harvey's World; I was not about to lose anybody else on this planet.

"They're gone Chief. Trust me on this one," said George quietly. That bastard George! Why couldn't he at least stutter or sneeze before he said that?

"Screw you!" I shouted. "I'm the gadgeteer around here. Those units are malfunctioning until I say they're not. You both know that. So let me check the data, and I'll let you know."

I started to rise to go check out the telemetry system, when Janet pulled me down. "Relax Chief," she said softly. "I've got another job for you. I want you to set us down. I want you to set us down right next to SN1. George, break out the armored e-suits. We're going to need them. Let's go get our people."