On 23/35/02 Venus Date the Eagle was fully loaded and ready for the long haul back up to Earth. The colonists gathered to bid us farewell, and the party was a corker. Bat did his human radar act somewhere along about the time the fifteenth libation was poured. He was at his extra-normal best, telling astounded colonists just what they were doing with their pinkies at ranges up to three hundred yards in pitch darkness. I could have told them that he was almost as good as UVR, but that might have spoiled the effect.
Three hours later we had bid an enthusiastic good-bye to that mushy ball of swamp and stench those poor colonials called home, and the valves sighed shut in the Eagle's flanks. The loading cranes pulled away and our own were retracted. The ramp was cleared and the lift-ship alarm blared through the Eagle.
The gyros reached operating RPM and I let my hands play over the consoles. The boat shuddered and lifted slowly on a tail of fire. I fed her more power and the accelerometer moved up to 2G. I held her there until we broke out of the clouds and into the crystalline cobalt of the ionosphere. I swung the power lever over and the Eagle leaped upward, her needle-nose pointed for home.
We were well past turn-over, in fact just about nineteen hours from Earth when things began happening.
Bat called Control, his voice tense with excitement. "Morley! There's something coming ... fast! I can feel it!"
I started to ask him what was coming in fast, and whether or not he could "see" it clearly through the metal of the ship, but I never finished. UVR flashed a red alert warning on my control panel ... and it was the last warning it ever gave.
The panel screeched: "METEOR SWARM!" and went dead. The lights flickered and went out as the Eagle bucked and roared in protest. The sound of tearing metal knifed through the hull, and then the whooshing sound of escaping air. Alarm bells clattered futilely—bulkheads slammed. The ship's self-sealing mesoderm saved most of the air, but not before the pressure in the boat dropped from 14.7 down to 6 lbs. per square inch in about two seconds and doubled me up in an agony of aero-embolism. For a long while there was silence, and I fought the glittering knives of pain that seemed to be cutting me into hamburger. Then the lights came back on, dimly. There was still life in the old Eagle.
