It is of such coincidence that great tragedies and great victories are born.
The meteor, a small one as cosmic objects go, passed in through the broad observation dome at the top of the ship. Unhampered, it zipped through the central well of the Ariadne and passed out through the pilot's greenhouse at the bottom of the ship. Its speed was nothing worth noting; a scant twenty miles per second almost sunward. But the eleven hundred miles per second of the Ariadne made the passage of the meteor through the six hundred feet of the ship's length of less duration than the fastest camera shutter.
In those microseconds, the meteor did much damage.
It passed through the main pilot room cable and scrambled those circuits which it did not break entirely. It tore the elevator system from its moorings. It entered as a small hole in the observation dome and left taking the entire pilot's greenhouse and all of the complex paraphernalia with it.
The lines to the driver tubes were scrambled, and the ship shuddered and drove forward at 10 gravities. An inertia switch tried to function, but the resetting solenoid had become shorted across the main battery and the weight could not drop.
Air doors clanged shut, closing the central well from the rest of the ship and effectively sealing the well from the crew.
The lights in the ship flickered and died. The cable's shorted lines grew hot and fire crept along its length and threatened the continuity. The heat opened fire-quenching vents and a cloud of CO2 emerged together with some of the liquid gas itself. The gas quenched the fire and the cold liquid cooled the cable. Fuses blew in the shorted circuits—
And the Ariadne continued to plunge on and on at 10 gravities: the maximum speed possible out of her driving system.
The only man who remained aware of himself aboard the Ariadne was the man who was filled with gravanol and adhesive tape. No other person expected to be hammered down by high acceleration. Only Channing, intending to leave Terra in his own little scooter, was prepared to withstand high G. He, with his characteristic haste of doing anything slowly, was ready to make the Terra to Venus Equilateral passage at five or six gravities.
It might as well have caught him, too. With all of the rest unconscious, hurt, or dead, he was alone and firmly fastened to the floor of the salon under eighteen hundred pounds of his own, helpless weight.