“Beautiful!” exclaimed the Second Officer. “Fusion ramjets!”

“Yes. Fusion ramjets. It’s an old idea, never quite practical for the interstellar medium because you just couldn’t find enough gas out there. But here, we’ve got more than we’ll ever need.”

“You’re right,” Tam said. “I do love it.” She was still smiling hopefully, and had just started floating away from her post to shake Anjin’s hand personally, when the lights flickered and a distant crackling roar penetrated through kilometers of rock and ice, shaking the walls of the cabin. Tam, still drifting toward Anjin, looked at him with an expression that said, What are your machines doing to us? and saw him looking back with one that said, That wasn’t me!

Almost simultaneously one of the ship’s lookouts called in great excitement. “Bridge! Did you feel that?”

“What do you see?”

“Sunquake right ahead, sir.”

“Thank you,” acknowledged the skipper with curiously detached courtesy. Nothing more was said.

For the next thirty-seven seconds all hands grabbed handholds and all eyes turned toward the pads to watch a spectacle almost as terrifying as the relativistic bombing of Earth, if for nothing more than its sheer scale. Tam and Anjin floated side by side, watching the flames—more than ten Earth diameters at their base—draw nearer. Now they were almost on top of the firestorm, and still the comet did not turn, could not turn, for Anjin’s ramjets were not quite ready, the ship’s altitude not quite low enough, and the atmosphere not quite dense enough. The eruption, shining with what had to be planetary volumes of colored fires, towered more than 410,000 kilometers above their heads, and everyone aboard braced for a crash.

Then, miraculously, the fires began to part like the waters of the Red Sea in the Book of Exodus. At the last second, walls of plasma opened up and glided swiftly by on the port and starboard sides. It looked to Tam like a very close shave.

In the next moment a curious motion communicated itself through the walls and handholds, as if the ship were grinding heavily across a field of marbles. What had reached them before as a distant crackling noise now grew louder and more disquieting, reminding Susan Skurla of someone tearing a long, long strip of calico.

Anjin was calling orders into his pad, and his machines were adjusting the trim of the ship’s magnetic fields accordingly, allowing the comet to slip with relative ease through a tunnel of its own creation.

“Any damage?” Tam called out, wondering why she wasn’t laughing hysterically.

“I don’t think so,” said Anjin. “It’s just a magnetic storm trying to shake us up a little bit—but it’s really not much more violent than a bad case of air turbulence.”

Tam noticed that Anjin was tunneling down as well as ahead through the fire, using his magnetic field lines somewhat like rudders and ailerons on a plane. She searched for but could find no expression of alarm on his face, just a serene trace of thrill, as if he were actually beginning to enjoy the new challenge.