First Published: 1950 METEOR by William T. Powers 
 TOBIAS HENDERSON, MASTER OF THE BRITISH FREIGHTER, BRONSON, was relaxing at tea. The Callisto-Mars run was long and dull, but Tobias knew how to be comfortable. In fact, getting comfortable was the one thing at which Tobias was better than average. He had to be. Freight and Martian sauces had combined their effects to make him the third largest item on the Bronson, and one might have debated the advantage held by the computer-detector.
 For reasons other than jealousy, Tobias hated the computer. The main drive might flatten him somewhat on take-off and landing, but the computer had been known to snatch the Bronson from under its master's feet, causing him to misname countless safety-engineers, just to avoid some pebble. Today, as usual, Tobias squinted at the computer before he injected his cream into the tea bag. Promptly, a red light popped on.
 "Coward!" Tobias muttered. "It won't come within a hundred miles!" The red light went out. Tobias creased his face in brief triumph, then pulled the stopper out of the tea bag and inserted a straw, an uncivilized process made necessary by free-flight. The red light popped on again. Hopefully, Tobias ignored it.
 Something clicked rapidly in the bulkhead where the monster was hidden; Tobias sighed and braced himself for the recoil of the blasters. Unfortunately, a grip on the desk was not enough to save him. The Bronson shuddered sideways, skittering out of its orbit to let something too big to blast go by. Tobias, unable to express himself, oscillated to a stop in his triple harness and glared in black silence at the globules of tea quivering off the bulkheads. After a suitable pause, the computer went ahem and slid a card out where Tobias could see it.
 The lettering was red. 
 The meteor was out of sight of the Bronson in a few seconds, plunging on toward the orbit of Mars, aimed a little above the Orion nebula. This , i
 . 
 11, was a fast meteor from outside the system, nearly zero Kelvin, six miles across. One fiat side might have been a plain at one time; the other surfaces were harsh and jagged, signs of a cataclysm. The sun lit an exposed stratum, picking out the fossil of an ancient tree.
 Thirty miles a second the meteor traveled. In twenty-four hours, it would have gone the twenty-five hundred kilomiles separating it from the orbit of Mars. The intersection point was no more than a thousand miles from the place where Mars' advancing limb would be tomorrow. 
 Phil Brownyard dropped a penny in the You-Vu-It just in time to see a screenful of little bright spots fade to a shot of an announcer.
 "There you have it, folks. Danvers came up from the sixth quad at well over three miles per second, just in time to avert a scoring play by Syverson and Phelps. His ship snagged the Mark into free territory, but he couldn't turn fast enough to keep in-bounds. That, of course, ended the period. Now a word from--"
 Phil reached out for a switch, but the commercial droned on. Frustrated, he grumbled and pushed his dessert away. He had a grudge against the game of Ten-Mark that included its sponsors. The pilots who played had a rugged, exciting life, full of pretty girls, big money, and sudden death. Two years were all a man could stand of the screaming accelerations and close shaves, but those two years--! Phil shoved his chair back and headed for the elevators. Pushing his way to the expresses, he glimpsed Fred Holland from Computing coming around the comer; he stood in the doorway of the car until Fred caught up.
 "Hi, Phil!" Fred grinned. "Have a cigar!"
 "Boy?"
 "Yep." Fred grabbed for the handrail as the car shot up the shaft. "Twenty minutes ago. Aggie just vised me and everything's all right."
 "Tell Aggie Claire will be over tonight to help out."
 "Thanks. She could use some help. Well ... so long. Wait, your cigar!" Fred thrust a couple at Phil and hopped out the door. The car lifted swiftly and Phil pushed the buzzer.
 "Six-forty." The operator snapped as the door whipped open. Phil stepped out, ducking a little as a monorail messenger-car rushed by overhead. He pushed through the door marked Safety, waving hello to Doris, and went into the office.
 Run, run, run, he thought. Am I glad I'm not in Public relations! The swivel chair was big and soft, so he relaxed and pulled out a cigar.
 Behind him, monstrous New York City stretched. The six hundred fortieth story of the Government Building overlooked the city from half a mile above the top passenger levels; sixty miles from Phil's window the lights of the North Highway glowed steadily.
 Ten thousand square miles, eighteen million people, a vast system of conveyors, highways, terminals; a billion dollars worth of trade every day. New York City, 2055.
 The periphery was lined with homes that spewed hordes of commuters every eight hours. Past neat factories and a few local airports the subways sped, the crowded tunnels boring into the deepening pile of the city. Above them mounted in higher and higher tiers interlocking roadways, flat, sinuous conveyer-housings, office buildings and freight terminals climbing over each other. The hum of the city deepened to a growl, grew to a rumble, swelled into thunder; the sound drifted up past the levels, picking up the zum of tires and the crowd-babble. The sound filtered around steel and stone and hung among the upthrust skyscrapers, fading at last into the dark upper air.
 On the tip of every spire were thick-limbed UHF arrays pouring out power to the stars. The million kilowatt beams swept steadily through the sky, balancing on the rotating earth, hurling their messages through the system of planets.
 Back through the Heaviside Layer, feeble signals returned, to be gathered and sorted by the city's robot brains. 
 In a corner of the government computing room, a silent coder came to life. A card hopped into one of its racks, and the machine buzzed briefly. The card, punched and stamped, slid quickly into the works of the nearest idle router.
 Plate voltage flashed briefly, and the monster decided to send the card to Safety. Along a hidden wall the card sped, up one floor and into another router that punched it twice and sent it to Spatial Debris.
 At the first sign of life from the next stage, a signal was shot down five stories to Computing, where the termination of phase one was recorded on microfilm.
 Phase two began. Electronic fingers probed the card and withdrew. A rudimentary brain thought a moment, and a little set of thumbs descended to press the card, embossing on it the co-ordinates of an orbit. The card jumped ahead ten inches and a metal stamp jolted it. A pneumatic tube flipped open and the last machine capsuled the card, which now bore one red edge and the admonition, "DANGER." The card whistled up five stories and thumped to a stop by Phil's left elbow.
 Phil looked indecisively at the ash on his cigar, then flipped it off and ground out the stub. He reached for the capsule, tingled a bit when he saw the red edge.
 A print-send writer stood to the left of the desk; Phil inserted the card and the machine began to clatter. A strip of tape inched out.
 "Meteor. A-2 to B-s. 27-32 mps. det. 2994663.6033. Coord. 270.665-160332 x 103 --710.4 Dir.Cos. 0.000355,-0 554639 29 358 mps
 The rough equation of an hyperbolic orbit followed. Phil went to the lucite plan-map of the minor planets and began to plot points. Four points fed into the Curvator sufficed; an arm descended over the chart and began to trace a heavy black line, jogging at equal-time intervals. The tip of the arm approached the orbit of Mars, intersecting it just as the red spot designating Mars moved into its path. The Curvator, having reached the limit of its accuracy, stopped and flashed an orange light that meant "possible collision."
 That meant that the meteor would miss the planet by no more than eight thousand miles, if at all. Phil was by now totally alert. The probable mass of the meteor was twelve billion tons, its velocity thirty miles per second. Only the heaviest of equipment would be capable of breaking it up and diverting the pieces into the sun. Were it to strike Mars, it would pick up another three miles per second before it hit, then it would release the equivalent of five billion kilowatt-hours of energy in a fraction of a second. A large piece of Martian vicinity could be vaporized.
 Another card called Phil back to his desk; he gave it a quick glance and filed it. Now there was work to be done; Mars had to be warned, although New Pitt undoubtedly had received the report.
 A quick call to Computing set Fred Holland to work on the exact orbit, and Phil turned to the chart again. The markers on the orbit showed that about twenty-two hours remained--New Pitt, on Mars, would pick up the meteor in roughly an hour. Phil sent a copy of the orbit out to Doris, with instructions to get it on the emergency circuit to Mars.
 The preliminaries over, Phil sat behind his desk and began to have his customary regrets. Whenever a big rock struck the space lanes, Phil wondered what he was doing here. Whenever the rock was really big, the chief of SD slashed the arteries of the Solar System with efficiency and finality. The advent of robot freighters had made the job easier, but still each day's ban cost somebody millions. Phil bit his lip and lit another cigar. The responsibility of his office was not to save millions, but to save lives.
 The minute hand crept forward, timing the flight of his message. In just seventeen minutes from the time Phil gave Doris the message, acknowledgment arrived. Doris brought in the spacegram personally. 496 William T. Powers "Mr. Brownyard--" She hesitated at the door.
 "Good, they didn't waste any time." Phil reached out and Doris came up to him with the message.
 "Mr. Brownyard, can I ask something?"
 Phil looked up blankly from the spacegram. "Huh? Oh, sure. What?"
 "Well ... my boy friend is on the North America. I wondered if you could tell me--" She stopped. It was strictly against the rules to give any advance information.
 Phil hesitated. The spacegram said that the route outbound from Mars had been changed, and nothing more.
 "I'd like to help," he said, "but I'm afraid we don't know the situation yet about the Earth-Mars route. Don't worry, though. We don't miss on these big ones." 
 Twenty-one hours later, he was staring at another spacegram, remembering his comforting words of the day before. The heading was EMERGENcY; the spacegram was direct from the Stag Head detector station.
 METEOR 842M2055 OUT OF CONTACT. EAST STATION INOPERATIVE, STAG HEAD STATION HORIZONED. LAST ACCURATE ORBIT--
 Phil dropped the spacegram and looked back at the chart on the desk. The red line of the meteor's orbit made a shallow curve that missed the planet by a scant eighty miles. Arcing outward from Mars, the line was dotted. From there on, it was guesswork. Atmospheric drag and the proximity of Deimos combined to make the uncertainty in the orbit dangerous.
 Phil buzzed Fred Holland and reached for the standard route-cancellation form. Forcing all misgivings out of his mind, he printed carefully the necessary information and orders.
 The Earth-Mars route had to be cut. From now until SD said all clear, no ship would run in these lanes, or anywhere within a spreading truncated cone that represented the danger volume. No ship would move between Earth and Mars except by the long expensive detour out of the ecliptic. Phil sent the form out to Doris, glad to get it out of sight. As an afterthought, he buzzed her.
 "You don't need to worry about your boy friend. He's taking the long way around."
 "Thanks a lot, Mr. Brownyard. I guess I won't get his wire for a couple of days, then." She let him break the connection.
 Phil paid no attention to her last words for a moment; then the implication sank in. "A couple of days--?" That could mean the North America was nearing the danger volume. He began to check.
 "Terran Lines? Spatial Debris calling. Message number, July 3357-563. METEOR 497 Get the North America off the route, but quick. Never mind, just get her at least eight hundred kilomiles above the ecliptic, or equivalent. This is official. Now get me her position."
 A short verification of his authority followed, then the Terran operator relayed the request to the North America. The wait was almost fourteen minutes, by which time Phil was visualizing a ship, crushed and shattered, being swept through space by the massive meteor. The Terran man reappeared, looking pale.
 "I'll send it over on the writer. We just got the flash from your office, and we're right smack in the middle. I hope you guys know what you're talking about."
 "If I were you, I'd hope we didn't," Phil said, and cut off.
 He looked in the writer and got the message. The North America would be making an emergency turn by now, he thought. Hope it doesn't take them into the wrong spot at the wrong time.
 Spatial Debris began to hum. Phil had made the first decision; now the rest of the office was busy. A flight on another passenger line was canceled fifteen minutes before take-off--too close! All the robot freight companies were checked and individually warned. On the master chart in Phil's office, little dots accumulated, making a dense stream along the space route. Eight hundred ships, a quarter of them carrying passengers, were diverted. No more than two hours passed before complaints began to roll in by spacegram and by viser.
 "I'll lose a good prospect if I don't deliver--"
 "Exactly where is this meteor--?"
 "Why don't you jerks leave us alone? I've been in space thirty years--"
 "How long--" (How long, Phil thought, can seventy million miles e)
 He stood it for half an hour, then had the public line disconnected and received only official and emergency calls. The next call he got was from Terran Lines. The North America had reported a brief sight on the meteor, but no data on it; the ship was in its emergency turn. Could she go back on course?
 Phil told them to hang on a while. He gave the meteor an approximate position, estimating from the position of the Terran ship. The dot lay far above the danger volume.
 "Permission refused. Not the same meteor." Phil switched to video and explained. "It's probably a small, close one, blastable. You can sit easy, though. Your ship's out of danger as long as you keep her north." The Terran agent thanked him, with reservations--canceled reservations, probably.
 The meteor's path clung obstinately to the trade route; its progress was measured not in linear kilomiles, but in days, and the days looked to add up to several weeks. Government blasters took off from Mars trying to locate the rock, while Phil started losing sleep.
 A week passed. The blasters had returned four times and had hurtled off again. Somewhere out there a six-mile mote was falling toward the Sun, and while electronic nets were spreading, the system was suffering.
 SD STILL SAYS NO! said one headline; another gently hinted, FORTY MILLION DOLLARS SO FAR! The safety bureau took a beating from all sides. Daily, on the financial pages, a little box appeared giving the space-time coordinates of the meteor. As the weeks wore on, the blasters began taking off from bases on Luna, searching doggedly for a grain of sand in a flour bin. By now the danger volume was an impossible ten trillion cubic miles. The thinning stream of ships was flowing almost Ecliptic North from the Earth as Mars approached conjunction. No ship gleamed along the whole free-flight trade orbit. Well--one. 
 Planetoid 17321 belonged to Terry Carson by virtue of a claim filed in Big Bay, Mars. Terry's ship was resting lightly against the half-mile boulder while Terry was "underground" in his pneumatic hut, tight. 1731 was on the chart in Spatial Debris, and its orbit was known exactly. The fact that it was inside the danger volume was of incidental interest. The fact that there was a man in it would have attracted a good deal more attention; however, Terry's flight plan was crushed somewhere in the works of the crippled East Station.
 The tunnel Terry had dug extended forty yards into 1731. The walls were plain rock thirty-six yards of the way, right up to the door of the pneumatic hut. From there on, the pick strokes had flaked off blue-gray chips in isolated spots, spots that came more frequently over the last yard. Terry was sitting inside his rubber-canvas hut, a bottle in one hand and a chunk of pure galena in the other.
 "I'm rich," he murmured happily. "Hear that, Carson? You're rich. He's rich, they say. She's rich, it's rich." He let his head drift down on the sleeping bag and chuckled in his belly.
 The vein was ninety feet thick, fifty yards across, pure lead sulphide. Terry had been looking for this rock from the time of the Tompkins strike, eighteen years ago. Eleven fragments of a larger planetoid had been found, each containing a segment of lead ore vein. A topologist friend of Terry's had pieced the rocks together on paper. He had found a gap in the vein, and 1731 was the missing piece. Soviet Atomic was currently paying two-fifty a pound for lead, correspondingly for ore. Terry did some figuring. 
 Terry tilted the bottle again. He whispered: "Maybe a million bucks!" He reached for his portable radio.
 If Terry had kept up on current events, he would have known that Earth station KWK had switched off its beam for the duration of the emergency. But then, Terry didn't know there was any emergency. He batted the plastic box, but all that came out was the hiss of the distant stars. The gold leaf showed that the filaments were still active; it indicated that the batteries and electrets were good enough. Terry began to feel uneasy.
 He scrambled into his suit, the effect of the alcohol wearing off. Back at the ship, he switched on the long-range radio and fiddled the dial back and forth while the power supply warmed up. Still no KWK. He spun the dial to WLW, and blew out his breath in relief. The familiar reliable time-ticks beeped away, and Terry relaxed and listened. He spun the dial to the MBC--their wide beam inclosed 1731-- and he had music. The default of KWK passed quickly from his mind, and he flopped in his bunk and da-dreamed, his fingers twitching now and then as he peeled off a hundred-dollar bill.
 At o645 UT, the news came on. Terry paused in the midst of purchasing an Indo-Venusian palace, sat up gradually, and froze.
 "... The situation is rapidly becoming serious," the commentator was saying. "For the last three weeks, trade has been falling off at an increasing rate. Conjunction is only a month away, and passenger lines are straining at the leash. Nobody wants to travel. The Department of Safety remains obstinate--no direct flights until the meteor is gone. One wonders a little--the government has sent over sixty long-range blasters after the meteor, and there hasn't been one contact. At a time like this, yours truly would be inclined to say, 'Look before you leap.' Are you listening, Mr. B?"
 At 0700 the co-ordinates of the meteor were broadcast. Terry was startled to hear how large the uncertainty was, and it was with reluctance that he punched the necessary figures into the computer.
 "I'm in it!" he despaired. "They can't do this to me!" But he knew they could. They could send out a blaster after him, leave 1731 unguarded. They could-
 If they were coming after him, Terry reasoned, they would have arrived long ago. So, he guessed more or less correctly, his flight plan must have been snarled up in red tape. He chortled, then swallowed his laughter. Sure, he could stay here--but if the meteor hit, by some long chance, he'd lose both his strike and his life. He chortled again, uncontrollably, and then giggled.
 In an instant he was through the mid-section hatch fumbling with the 
 500 William T. Powers air-generator. The increasing numbness of his fingers hindered him, and he had to concentrate to remember which way the valve turned. The oxygen-content meter was up to sixty percent. Deliberately, Terry slowed his breathing, and reluctantly bled the ship, running helium into the ship's atmosphere until the oxy meter was back to normal. With a start he noticed that the helium tank was nearly exhausted; then he noticed that the hiss of incoming oxygen was still sounding. Terry's heart wrenched as he stared at the oxygen gauge. He figured quickly--twenty minutes. Twenty minutes! A leak. All the time he had been digging, celebrating, the main air supply had been draining out a puncture. As he watched the gauge needle twitched and came to rest again a fraction of a division from the stop. Terry tapped the dial, watching the needle quiver toward zero. Red flag, air supply gone. He breathed deeply, waited two more minutes, then when he could get no more from his ship's vanishing atmosphere, donned his suit. Four hours of air remained in its tank and regenerator, maybe twelve hours in the hut. Sixteen hours left to breathe. So Terry did v.hat any old hand would have done. He set the distress signal to WLW, beamed it at Earth, and went to sleep. The signal screamed its hundred-megacycle note down the empty space lane, and was lost. 
 Peter Hedrick, smuggler by trade, watched a cold Alaskan sky darken, and wrote in his log, "0700. Sky becoming overcast. Take-off in thirty minutes. Consignment, Poppy seed to Big Bay." He had a fine load, a big fast ship and a space lane all to himself--almost. One meteor was worth chancing. He snapped the log shut and strolled toward the camouflaged ship.
 "My dear," Mrs. Ashton confided to the private telescreen, "I know just how you feel. Now don't worry a bit. After all, your John always did like to have his little flings, and everyone understands. He'll be back. And I wouldn't worry too much. Peter says he has it from a very good source that this whole thing is just another meteor scare."
 The screen babbled back briefly.
 "All right," Mrs. Ashton smiled. "I'll surely let you know. Bye-bye." She cut off the screen and let the smile become a smirk. Mrs. Phelps' superb husband was in his private yacht somewhere between here and Mars, and everyone but Mrs. Phelps knew he had company. For a few moments, Mrs. Ashton considered the dramatic possibilities in Mr. Phelps and his yacht being crushed by the meteor, but not beyond recognition. Phil Brownyard was beginning to repress all optimism concerning the
 position of the meteor. The failure of the blasters to locate it gave pretty F METEOR 50 I
 good odds that it was well out of the volume assigned to it, and that
 meant out of the shipping lanes. But there was always one chance. Phil
 merely shoved the other nine hundred ninety-nine out of his consciousness and clung to that one.
 He got to the office early the twenty-eighth day after the alert. There
 was no sense in sitting at home in the dark, so he opened the office at
 0725. The reports were still the same--no contact. The black line on the
 chart extended now from Mars to within two million miles of Earth. Half
 a day at the most before Luna would pick up whatever was there. Phil
 gave a nervous yawn.
 The clock crept laboriously to 0730. Phil doodled on a pad, drawing
 daggers and ominous blots. 0731. He got up and looked out the window
 at the city, noting the beauty of the towers in the early morning light
 0732. Out in the corridor messenger cars whipped back and forth; all the
 building was alive except for Spatial Debris and a few others. Phil sat
 in his soundproofed office and bit the end off a cigar. Paper rustled as he
 propped his elbows on the desk.
 At 0734, the telescreen shrieked. Phil jumped, dropping his cigar.
 Before the automatic dial could switch the call to his home, he flipped the toggle and leaned forward.
 "Brownyard?" A switchboard operator stared sleepily at him.
 "Yeah, who is it?"
 "Mr. Cushing of Terran Lines, collect. Will you accept the call?"
 "Go ahead."
 Cushing's face blurred too close to the pickup lens. "Brownyard, we've
 found your meteor!" He roared. "It just hit the North America!" The
 screen blanked out.
 Instantly it came to life again. An excited young man appeared and
 stammered, "North Station Luna calling. Meteor 842M2055 detected.
 Co-ordinates and orbit follow."
 Phil acknowledged automatically, knowing it was too late. Switching
 to another band, he called the night Safety office. His stomach knotted,
 and hurt.
 "What's this about the North America?" he asked Jim Shepard.
 "Oh ... you, Phil. Well, she's hit all right. Taking off for Stag Head.
 Collided at sixty-eight thousand miles; almost nothing left. The patrols
 are going after her now."
 "O.K." Phil started to sign off, then tensed. "Hey ... hey--!"
 "Yeah?" Jim reappeared, his face sympathetic.
 "What did you say her distance was?"
 "Sixty-eight kilomiles. Why, do you think--?" 502 William T. Powers 
 "You bet!" Phil stiffened his aching back and went to work. "That couldn't have been our baby. I just got a contact report from Luna, and I was still convinced that 842 had got the North America. Let's get busy-here are the co-ordinates." Phil dug into the writer and came up with the message card. He stuck it into the slot under the screen, received the acknowledgment, and cut off. His hands were shaking badly.
 How many hours to work? Phil retrieved the card and scanned it, then went to the chart and plotted the point. Nine hundred and eighty kilomiles. That left--nine hours. Only nine hours for the blasters to try to match velocities, nine hours to--Phil tightened inside as the curvator started forward to trace a new black line. It swept inside the orbit of the Moon, straight into the green disk that was Earth. The crimson light went on.
 He had known it would end this way, for a long time. From the instant he had deciphered the first flash, he had had a funny feeling; he had known that the danger volume would sweep over Earth, but he had hoped for just a little more luck, one little favor from the laws of probability. The invisible fingers of Earth tugged, and the great rock obeyed.
 Trembling with tension, Phil called Computing and got them to work. In half an hour the answer returned. The west coast of the European continent would be hit; it would take three hours to pinpoint the spot.
 Phil frowned and rubbed his forehead. It was silly to feel this way, of course. He had carried out his duties as well as he could--a thousand ships had been warned, the space lanes had been held clear. But he felt a sense of responsibility that he could not shake. 
 At eleven fifteen Fred Holland walked in holding a card. "Here it is. We've got it down to a twenty-mile circle in southwestern France. Impact time is 1618." He dropped the card on the desk. "Look, Phil, there's nothing you can do that you haven't done."
 "One more thing." Phil took the card without looking at it and sent it to the main Safety office. "Now I can resign." 
 "This is Jim, Phil. The North America was hit by an unscheduled ship that took off from Alaska somewhere. What's the dope on the meteor? I heard it's bad."
 "Yeah. Southwestern France, somewhere." Phil wondered vaguely about the identity of the other ship. For some reason, the feeling of guilt grew stronger. "Any survivors?" he asked.
 And his heart did not change its pace when Jim said, "No." METOR 5°3 
 Thirteen hundred, and the hourly news. Phil listened dully as the reports came in from the reopened space lanes. A private yacht had been sighted cruising illegally in the lane. Some scandal or other impended. Planetoid 17321 left the lane and the gap caused by its presence closed. Collision near Mars in the rush to take advantage of approaching conjunction. Stag Head Station operative again. On and on.
 The meteor was between Earth and the Moon, now, its pace quickening. In two more hours and some minutes it would rocket into Earth's atmosphere; incandescent and thundering it would smash into France with a towering splash of earth, rock and living things. Ten million refugees streamed along the roads leading out of that imaginary circle, quiet and terrified, peering into the luminous afternoon sky. Police were thick in the mobs, suppressing panic.
 Phil quit listening to the news at 1500. He busied himself around the office, collecting papers accumulated over the past eight years.
 Maybe I can afford to retire. That would be nice. Get away, at any rate. Maybe Claire would like Venus.
 He came on the computations he had made, those about the mass of the meteor. A strange hope kindled, but the figures were right. He began to fill his briefcase. As he started to leave, he looked long at the clock. Twelve minutes. As the door shut, a card in its capsule bumped against the end of the pneumatic tube. The punchings on it indicated that a distress signal had been picked up from somewhere near the trade route.
 Eight years ago, a meteor had got by the warning net--another big one. That one had smashed into a loaded passenger liner, and the disaster had broken Phil's predecessor. Now Phil had to watch an even worse disaster-had watched it from its first remote beginnings.
 He sat in a subway train, holding a newspaper and looking at his watch. Not many people were in the car--most of them were sitting by television screens, watching France with morbid anticipation. The car whistled past a few deserted stops and began to brake. The minute hand on Phil's watch crept over the ten, past it, while Phil read the billboards.
 Two minutes. The train started smoothly, went quickly to maximum velocity, then slowed for Phil's stop. 
 "Phil--is that you? Hey, Phil?"
 He looked up blindly, then glanced out the window. The end of the line. Must have missed my stop. Claire will be worried-
 "Hey, Phil--" Fred stopped by the hunched figure "Come on, Phil, I'll take you home in my car." 
 504 William T. Powers 
 It was pleasant to lie in bed and only half-think. The sun shone warmly in the window and the sky was blue. Phil smiled and stretched. Then his head swung to the window--the sun was too high! It must be noon! He started to get up, and felt an overpowering lassitude cloud his mind. He lay back and thought, They'll call me if they need me. The dusk swirled around him and he relaxed in it again.
 The second time he woke he felt his mind gradually coming to life. Bit by bit, his senses returned. The covers were too warm--it was dark again--someone was in the room.
 "Claire?" A sense of panic stirred him.
 "Quiet, darling. How do you feel?"
 "All right, I guess. What time is it?" He relaxed.
 "Nineteen thirty. Are you--all right?" Her voice showed strain.
 "Sure, honey. Turn on the video, will you?" Claire turned, tears of relief in her eyes.
 "All right. Fred wants to see you." She stopped at the door and smiled at him. "We were worried about you, darling."
 Phil got up as soon as she had left and went to her dressing table. In the mirror his face was puffed with sleep and lined by long fatigue. He heard Fred coming and got back into bed. L Fred came over to the bed and grinned down at Phil. "Boy, you look
 like hell."
 Phil found himself grinning back, feeling better. "I sure blew myself to a tantrum."
 "The doctor said human beings still have to sleep now and then."
 "What about the meteor?"
 Fred sat back and looked quizzically at Phil. "Still think it must have been your fault?"
 "No ... I guess not. No."
 "Well, then, you'll blow your cork when you hear." Phil's heart started pounding violently.
 "It came in, all right, right where we planted it," Fred said. "Only it burned up before it got through fifty miles of atmosphere. What a show!"
 "Did they blast it?" Phil sat up in bed.
 "Nope. Same meteor Luna spotted. Only those kids on Luna never thought to check on the mass. It weighed just a little over half a ton, and blew up halfway down."
 "But where's 84a? Are the lanes still cleared?"
 "Eight forty-two? Nobody knows. T. V. McPherson says he found some big gouges out of Deimos that look recent. Your baby is probably way, way south by now, according to him." METEOR 505 Phil began to laugh. "What's the matter?"
 "Nothing. Just struck me funny. I've been losing sleep over a ghost of a meteor for a whole month. Nine hundred and ninety-nine chances, and I had to take the one left over. Look ... I'll see you tomorrow ... come over for dinner. Right now, I'm going back to sleep. Excuse me." He rolled onto his side and began to drift off. As Fred reached out to turn off the video, the announcer was saying something about a prospector; something about a prospector who might have been lost if a patrol craft hadn't chased a yacht into his failing distress beam. But before Phil could get it straight, he fell asleep.