The captain ordered the ship turned bow-on to face the storm. Warnings, whistles and shouts and electric bells, sounded all around the ship.

"What's happening?" Sand asked, concern finally replacing his anger.

"Meteor," Samshow said. "Big one."

The front hit seven minutes after Samshow saw the fireball strike the horizon.

The ship fell forward into canyonlike wave troughs, its bow knifing ten and fifteen meters into the black water, and then rode upward over the crests, the bow now pointing at the rain-lashed sky. Samshow and Sand tightly gripped rails mounted on the bridge bulkheads, grinning like fools, while the crew worked to control the ship and the Captain stared stonily forward.

"I've been through worse!" Samshow shouted at his partner over the roar.

"I haven't, I don't think," Sand shouted back.

"It's exhilarating. Something truly exotic—a real first. An observed large meteor fall in midocean, and its results. We'd better alert all coasts."

"Who's going to write the paper?"

"We'll do it together."

"I locked down the equipment after the anomaly. We'll have to make another run when this clears up."

The Discoverer, Samshow thought, would weather the storm easily enough. It was not going to be a long blow. When he was sure of this, as the violent rain and waves declined, he retired to his quarters to look up the facts and figures and equations he would need to understand what had just happened. Sand staggered down the stairs and corridors, stopping in Samshow's hatchway long enough to say he was going to check again on his blessed gravimeters.

The next day, when it was their turn to present the story by radio to the expedition's chiefs in La Jolla, they had still not sorted out their findings.

One thing puzzled them both immensely. All three gravimeters had registered the "jag" simultaneously. Shock had not caused the anomaly; the gravimeters had been designed to be carried aboard aircraft as well as ships, and could weather relatively rough treatment handily. Besides, the shock had occurred after the appearance of the spikes.

Sand put together a list of hypotheses, and revealed one candidly to Samshow when they were alone. "It's simple, really," he said in the galley over a late breakfast of corned-beef hash and butter-soaked wheat toast. "I made some calculations and compared the spikes on the three traces. The three tubs aren't really far enough apart to make the results authoritative, but I checked the digital record of each spike and found a very small time interval between them. I can explain the time interval in only one way. Doing a tidal analysis, and subtracting the ship's reaction as a gravitated object, the traces show an enormous mass, about a hundred million tons, traveling in an arc overhead."

"Coming from what direction?" Samshow asked casually.

"Due north, I think."

"How far away?"

"Anywhere from a hundred to two hundred kilometers."