“It’s funny, we’ve been working with Mayhem all these years and we never even met the guy.”

“Would you know him if you saw him?”

“Umm-mm, I guess not. Do you think we really can halt his elan in subspace and divert it over to the Glory of the Galaxy?”

“I take it you’re beginning to see things my way. And the answer to your question is yes.”

“Poor Mayhem. You know, I actually feel sorry for the guy. He’s had more adventures than anyone since Homer wrote the Odyssey and there won’t ever be any rest for him.”

“Stop feeling sorry for him and start hoping he succeeds.”

“Yeah.”

“And let’s see about getting a bead on his elan.”

The two young men walked to a tri-dim chart which took up much of the room. One of them touched a button and blue light glowed within the chart, pulsing brightly and sharply where space-sectors intersected.

“He’s in C-17 now,” one of the men said as a gleaming whiteness was suddenly superimposed at a single point on the blue.

“Can you bead him?”

“I think so. But I still feel sorry for Mayhem. He’s expecting to wake up in a cold-storage corpse on Deneb IV but instead he’ll come to in a living body aboard a spaceship on collision course for the sun.”

“Just hope he—”

“I know. Succeeds. I don’t even want to think of the possibility he might fail.”

In seconds, the gleaming white dot crawled across the surface of the tri-dim chart from sector C-17 to sector S-1.

The Glory of the Galaxy was now nineteen million miles out from the sun and rushing through space at a hundred miles per second, normal space drive. The Glory of the Galaxy thus moved a million miles closer to fiery destruction every three hours—but since the sun’s gravitational force had to be added to that speed, the ship was slated to plunge into the sun’s corona in little more than twenty-four hours.

Since the ship’s refrigeration units would function perfectly until the outer hull reached a temperature of eleven hundred degrees Fahrenheit, none of its passengers
 
knew that anything was wrong. Even the members of the crew went through all the normal motions. Only the Glory of the Galaxy’s officers in their bright new uniforms and gold braid knew the grim truth of what awaited the gleaming two-thousand ton spaceship less than twenty-four hours away at the exact center of its perihelion passage.

Something—unidentified as yet—in all the thousands of intricate things that could go wrong on a spaceship, particularly a new one making its maiden voyage, had gone wrong. The officers were checking their catalogues and their various areas of watch meticulously—and not because their own lives were at stake. In spaceflight, your own life always is at stake. There are too many imponderables: you are, to a certain degree, expendable. The commissioned contingent aboard the Glory of the Galaxy was a dedicated group, hand-picked from all the officers in the solar system.

But they could find nothing. And do nothing.

Within a day, their lives along with the lives of the enlisted men aboard the Glory of the Galaxy and the passengers on its maiden run, would be snuffed out in a brilliant burst of solar heat.

And the President of the Galactic Federation would die because some unknown factor had locked the controls of the spaceship, making it impossible to turn or use forward rockets against the gravitational pull of the sun.

Nineteen million miles. In normal space, a considerable distance. A hundred miles a second—a very considerable normal space speed. Increasing….

Ever since they had left Earth’s assembly satellites, Sheila Kelly had seen a lot of a Secret Serviceman named Larry Grange, who was a member of the President’s corps of bodyguards. She liked Larry, although there was nothing serious in their relationship. He was handsome and charming and she was naturally flattered with his attentions. Still, although he was older than Sheila, she sensed that he was a boy rather than a man and had the odd feeling that, faced with a real crisis, he would confirm this tragically.

It was night aboard the Glory of the Galaxy. Which was to say the blue-green night lights had replaced the white day lights in the companionways
 
and public rooms of the spaceship, since its ports were sealed against the fierce glare of the sun. It was hard to believe, Sheila thought, that they were only nineteen million miles from the sun. Everything was so cool—so comfortably air-conditioned….

She met Larry in the Sunside Lounge, a cabaret as nice as any terran nightclub she had ever seen. There were stylistic Zodiac drawings on the walls and blue-mirrored columns supporting the roof. Like everything else aboard the Glory of the Galaxy, the Sunside Lounge hardly seemed to belong on a spaceship. For Sheila Kelly, though—herself a third secretary with the department of Galactic Economy—it was all very thrilling.

“Hello, Larry,” she said as the Secret Serviceman joined her at their table. He was a tall young man in his late twenties with crewcut blond hair; but he sat down heavily now and did not offer Sheila his usual smile.

“Why, what on earth is the matter?” Sheila asked him.

“Nothing. I need a drink, that’s all.”

The drinks came. Larry gulped his and ordered another. His complete silence baffled Sheila, who finally said:

“Surely it isn’t anything I did.”

“You? Don’t be silly.”

“Well! After the way you said that I don’t know if I should be glad or not.”
............