"Well, I'll be—Biggs! Captain Hanson!"
"Yes?" Both men answered at once.
"There—there's a large body before us!"
He pressed a button. A glassy pane above the panel glowed into life. As if a portion of the Saturn's prow had been sheared away, I was looking at the vista before us. But it was no longer empty as, according to Biggs, it had been ever since the moment of the "accident." The stark, gray loneliness was relieved now by a monstrous pockmark in space. A giant sphere, imponderably distant, but definitely on our trajectory!
Hanson was a man of action, I learned. He leaped to the intercommunicating system.
"Chief Garrity! Large body for'rd! Reverse hypes and apply drag instantly. Todd, plot a course revision! Man! What a monster! Biggs, get out the charts. Something solid at last. Maybe we've busted back into our own universe!"
Biggs said, "Yes, sir! Right away, sir!" His eyes questioned Hank. But Cleaver shook his head.
"Nope, I don't think so. It ain't logical. That's a phenom—a phenom—a pee-culiarity o' the cockeyed universe we're in—Hey! What's goin' on here?"
The constant hum of the hypatomic motors below, one I had hardly noticed until suddenly it no longer throbbed in my ears, had subtly altered. A brief instant of silence, a jarring concussion—and a deeper, more resonant sound.