A flare of rockets thundered up, music boomed out, and the quartet of explorers saw how the monitors began to chant the old Doomsday song.  Anti-gravitational screens had quivered as energy pulsed through them from powerful microprocessing motors.  Back in the control room Elina, the navigation intelligence system's fembot, was flung into fellow copilot Chris Burke's arms, as the ship lurched.  ECS maintenance's Arthur Sims' fingers flicked rapidly over a score of buttons.  His usual grin had vanished, replaced by a jutting and noticeable jaw of surprise.  There was sudden tension in his attitude.  The triptanium-alloyed craft, in its obelisk-shaped grandeur, swung heavily to the left, then right.  Hastily everyone ran for the deck, and in similar quickness the ship bucked like a wild bronco.  A moment later it regained an even keel, and slowly, heavily, it began to mount.

    “Whoa,” said Arthur without relaxing. “What a barge! You can't maneuver the damn thing at all.  If we'd been using cold fusion booster rockets, we'd have cracked up pronto.  Some technology I gotta fix.”

    “But we can reach the asteroid, can't we?” Elina said electronically but worriedly.

    “We do have speed, but no maneuverability.  It'll be plenty risky, piloting a damaged jalopy through the belt.” Arthur's face was grim as he studied the lodeplate showing their course. 

    “I say we alter our trajectory and intercept the main asteroid in the outer rims,” Chris said. “That'll give us a certain amount of time before it gets too close to the Klerian sun.”

    “Yeah? Well Mr. Fixit over here is jamming the acceleration,” Arthur nodded. “Still, we can't meet the doomsday rock head on.  We'd pass it—we couldn't decelerate swiftly enough. We've got to curve around, slanting through the fragmented coma, and that's the most dangerous part.  To do that we'd have to sacrifice protection or maneuverability and jettison sections of the ship over and over again.  We're in a jam, but we've still got some protection.  But not enough, maybe, if we slant through the coma instead of going straight in.  I don't know how much electronic bombardment the rockets will stand.” He shrugged wryly.

    Chris agreed.  And only because Arthur was right.  It was a perilous venture.  Any of the more modernized triptanium-alloyed ships, with their controlled gravity terminals and ionized ECS piping, were able to stop on a micron.  But the bulk of this special spacecraft defeated its own purpose to some extent: not only an object of grandeur, but a big hulking vessel—lumbering, Goliath, and yet potentially vulnerable to the dangerous menaces that surrounded the king-size asteroid.

    Now she streaked out from the moons of Libra-17 with mad disregard for trespassers in her path.  Space traffic had been warned ahead of time, a lane being cleared.  A simple chart and map was before Arthur, citing the orbit of every known asteroid and meteor that blocked his route and surrounded the Libra quadrant.  The booster rockets were turned on full power, as was the hull, to give warning of any large body nearby.  It seemed no other precautions could be taken, as shaky as things were, unless the crew wore a special armor day and night.  It was the asteroid belt itself which provided the greatest obstacle.  Arthur knew this.  The outer hull had already been riddled by hundreds of punctures.  If the craft, with its overbearing length, had been smaller it could have slid through the swarm. Chris, though, saw—like his maintenance engineer of many years experience—that it would not be able to withstand or avoid the main body which, up close, would have killed, or at the very most, ruined the ship completely.           

    The hull's shields blew out with a terrific crash under the strain of trying to shrug off countless small but massive bodies.  But the second hull, built of triptanium-freighter ore, in its strongest steely form, withstood the slackened speed of most of the spatial missiles.  A few got through, but emergency fields were immediately deployed.  There were sparks coming from the control deck—two of the gravity terminals had been destroyed, the craft now thundering on amidst the stars.  Among the front section of the deck there was blank silence.  Arthur, Chris, and Elina the fembot looked at one another in dismay.  Arthur was the first to recover.  He looked at one man by his side, bleeding profusely. “Jonathan?” he said, shaking the boy. “Jonathan, wake up!” He shook his head. “Feller must have banged his head real rough.”

    “Why is he not getting up?” asked Elina. “Is he unconscious?”

    “Dead,” Arthur replied. “He was thrown into the edge of one of the databanks.  That makes three musketeers.”

    “Now what?” Chris inquired. “How do we contend with the doomsday rock?”

    Arthur flicked over a communications switch and yelled commands.  The emergency galvanized him into an energetic dynamo. “Android staff! I repeat, android staff! You are to mobilize at once! We are without a licensed pilot, only copilots! I repeat, only copilots.  Please get a report right away from engineering sublevels.  Let me know the extent of the damage.  Prepare two spacesuits for outside repairs.”

    One of the engineering droids hummed back, “Yes, sir.”

    “Outside repairs?” Elina said. “We're nearly at the rock.”

    “So what?” Arthur asked. “We're not taking this craft into the heart of the coma with a weakened hull or boosters.  Even after repair it'll be plenty risky.”

    Chris shook his head in melancholy as he looked down at Jonathan. “You do five-six years at the academy, become an explorer or researcher of the outer constellations only to find yourself in a predicament like this,” he said, “but when they want you to secure a big ass rock some twenty-thirty miles wide in diameter, try to throw it off course because one of the Libra colonies is in jeopardy, this kind of thing happens.”

    Elina and Arthur's pauses were nonetheless significant.

    “But we can enter the heart any time,” Elina went on. “If we're outside then—”

    “Then one spacesuit, Elina, for it'll be a volunteer job,” Arthur replied grimly.  Once more he turned to the communication portal. “Well?”

    “All the engineering droids have volunteered, sir,” the robot reported briefly. “We've been programmed to facilitate such repairs in case of such emergencies.” The engineering droid went on to list the damage and to what sectors. “We believe you are needed on deck at this current time, sir, and human life at such a time in such a place cannot be sacrificed.  Agree?”

    “Agree.  Issue tools.  Put enough droids inside to take care of that job, and enough to do the fixing outside.  Be with you right away.  Send up an emergency gravitational link droid to handle the repair of the lost terminals.”

    “Oh—you're going out as well?” Elina said. “But human life is precious.”

    “Yeah, well I'm sure Chris or myself would choose you but you're more human than droid.  And we need a navigator.”

    “Wait! So am I,” Chris remarked boldly. “Every little bit helps.” He grabbed his belt.

    “Chris!” Elina cried. “You can't—” She hesitated, breathing through her synthesized tongue. “If you do, I'm going too.”

    Arthur intervened. “We need every able body person we can get.  But droids only.  If I have to, I'll knock you out.  So I say Chris doesn't go.”

    “Listen, Arthur, I'm going out and you can't stop me,” Chris said bolder than before. “You may have seniority, but Jonathan is dead.  And you can help manage this ship.”

    Arthur grabbed the back of his neck and pulled him forward. “You betcha,” he said, blinking at him. “Seniority.”

    Elina, about to remonstrate, caught their eyes.  There was a satirical look in Arthur's, as though the older, braver one expected her to display human feminine weakness—even the slightest bit of hysterics.  The fembot's lips tightened.

    “Right,” she said succinctly. “Get lost, Sims.”

    Chris shook his head once more. “Why does he get to do all the dirty work?”

    As Arthur began mobilizing a small unit of repair droids, some were already working on the wall of the ship, welding on emergency patches hastily brought from the cargo bay and storage rooms.  Others were lining up before the airlocks, some entering the backside of the second hull, protected by their metal exteriors and bearing with them the necessary tools.  The larger welding machines were mounted on universal ball-bearing tripods made of light metal that could be rolled easily across the hull.  In each device was an integrated gravity-control unit, so the machine could be fixed firmly in place for the actual restoring.  Arthur counted three dozen droids at it and superintended the exodus.

    Outside the primary airlock, clad in his suit, oxygenation unit, and transparent helmet of supple glass, he started the first unit of droids at the ship's prow.  He saw impossibility concerning certain parts of the hull—mostly where the booster rockets started—in having to locate each microscopic puncture in the huge area of the primary hull.  But as each and every droid emerged, each picked up a portable tank, equipped with a flexible hose which ended in a round disc some ten feet in diameter.  Electronically they would place this disc flat against the hull, turn a nozzle in the tank, and walk slowly forward, dragging the hose after them.  The mass of the ship, coupled with the droids' walking capacity, made repair work and overall progression possible.  In the trail of each disc, tarlike substance gleamed whitely, congealing immediately in the vacuum of space.  Soon a good portion of the hull was completely plated with the stuff.

    Arthur barked an order into his suit's communication headset.  Inside the ship, a tool droid turned a valve, letting into the forward compartments of the main hull a cooling gas that expanded swiftly.  The ECS piping was temporarily shut down for this.  Where punctures occurred in the outer hull, the tarlike coating exploded into huge balloons, black and gray in contrast to its original surrounding whiteness, and marked the goal of dozens of droids, hurrying toward the punctures with their welding units. 

    It was a remarkable example of well-programmed coordination.

    More than once, Arthur glanced ahead at the tremendous sweep of the asteroid.  ECS piping turned back on and he shuddered abruptly, the rock, in his opinion, blotting out the view of the heavens.  Black void, star-speckled, mist and gaseous elements, lay all around him.  The droids worked in airless emptiness evenly, the Klerian sun a far disc astern.  He noticed the rock's pallid glare throwing its elongated shadows grotesquely along the hull.  And in the absence of air the sharp contrast between light and darkness was striking—no, foreboding.

    Inside, Elina sat up at the controls, her synthetic-skinned face drained of all color and grim, driving the ship slowly but steadily toward the asteroid's center.  Inexorably the red dot on the lodeplate screen crept toward the fragmented boundary of the coma.  When she entered it, she knew that man or machine alike, outside the ship, would die instantly from the bombardment. “Arthur, round up the robots and get in here now!” she communicated. “We're in reentry phase again.”

    Everyone, including the droids, realized the peril…still, not one thought of giving up their job, even though the asteroid was the target of apprehensive glances.  Arthur had the welding machines immediately, and pneumatically, against the hull.  Pallid fires sputtered and went ablaze, but slowly, in an eternity, the crippled giant was mended. 

    As its race through the void continued unchecked, acceleration rose dramatically.  In the control room, Elina gnawed her lips and watched the red dot leap swiftly, acceleration rising yet again as they headed for the asteroid's center. 

    A few inches lay between, and at this speed the gap would be bridged too quickly.  If Arthur was smart, the fembot thought to herself, he'd get inside this instant.  She saw that her hand hovered momentarily over a button—hesitation was unlike her—and drew back. Deceleration might not begin yet, but there was so little time.  The communication portal skirled, and Arthur's voice rasped out rather clipped and staccato.

    “Elina, how much time do we have?”

    She made a quick computation and told him. “Arthur—” she then said.

    “Yeah?”

    “Um…nothing,” she whispered, and turned back to the controls.  A lack of hope now encircled her, displayed itself from her steely gray eyes—danger for herself she could not face without flinching.  But this was different.  If Arthur died under the bombardment she knew it would be her hand that held some of the responsibility.  Eyeing the lodeplate, she had become visibly conscious that she had been holding her prayers for some time—even more unusual for a fembot.  She inhaled and exhaled deeply, tried to relax.  Useless.  The red speck crawled toward the asteroid.  It was less than a kilometer away.  A quarter of an inch of the nose, and the gap still narrowed; all the future crawled by her.  Soon the speck touched the very heart of the coma.  Her controls snapped.  She flicked the portal, calling shrilly, “Arthur, we're in the coma!”

    “Hold it, girly,” said a voice behind her. The fembot whirled, pivoting on her seat.  It was Chris, covered in engineering fluid but grinning.  From the threshold, unzippering his sublevel heat suit, he knew it was time to take back the copilot's station.  Behind him was Arthur, his face glistening with perspiration.

    Elina's reaction was instantaneous. “About time!” she snapped. “I've been—”

    “About time we decimated this rock,” Chris interrupted her, as he rubbed the crucifix around his neck in silent prayer.

    “True,” Arthur said. “We need to plant those time-released bombs in the very center.  If we don't, it won't only be the end of us but the Libra colony, who is depending on us at this very moment.”

    And then it happened.

    Only a mighty triptanium freighter could have withstood it if even for a moment; the bombardment would have destroyed an ordinary, lesser-alloyed ship instantly.  Elina now spun back toward the navigational control panel, her fingertips playing the keyboard like a pianist.  The ship rocked, shuddered, swayed, and screamed in tortured agony.  Nothing could prepare them for a meteorite storm this powerful, this intense.  The fabric of matter was the target for a blast of pure, unadulterated energy that raved and tore at the boosters.  Coolers rose into a shrill, high-pitched whine of incredible power.  Regardless, the hull—both secondary and primary—glowed red, weak patches flaring into white incandescence.  The skeleton of the ship strained and stretched as though on the rack; girders and struts of even the toughest interior metal screeched.  Elina felt a warning tingle in her fingertips.

    Arthur sprang to the communication portal. “All droids secure yourselves!” he called without hesitation. “I repeat, double-quick—secure yourselves!”

    “Special armor suits, Arthur,” Chris whistled to him. “We're gonna need them.”

    Arthur turned to Elina. “Well, get into it,” he snapped, his gloved hands playing light symphony with the buttons before him. “Hurry!”

    Elina scowled. “Didn't think it would be that much of a bumpy ride.”

    “Well,” Chris interjected, “the acceleration and coma changed our minds for us.”

    The fembot obeyed.  She knew that not even the triptanium shell could withstand the terrific bombardment of the asteroid's children, let alone the radioactive impact.  Much of the technology aboard would short-circuit, let alone a brain, unless protected by a helmet, such as Elina was hastily putting on.

    Often, a triptanium ship is silent.  But this was bedlam, as the rocket boosters keened in rhythmic, throbbing pulsations.  The lodeplate incessantly glowed and paled; it showed nothing but a racing flood of white light; the spectacle outside the control station window was even more frightening. 

    “Blind as a bat,” Arthur remarked, “yet there it is.  We're diving in quick, but should we break up—”

    Chris turned the ship into a narrowing spiral and began to decelerate.  Blind luck, the copilot figured, having a permit and not a license and all.  Still, a siren rang warningly.

    “What happened?” Arthur said, tripping over himself. “And what are you doing?”

    “One of the hull's patches has gone out,” Chris said. “Listen, above the roar.  I know we can do this.  It's now or never.”

    “But how?” Elina asked him. “Even with the decrease in acceleration, we can't—”

    “Yes we can!” Chris insisted. “If Arthur's willing to sacrifice a few of his robot pals, have them go back outside the hull with welding machinery and repair it, I can detach the explosives and set the time-releasing sequence from here, by remote.”

    “Wouldn't work,” Arthur snapped. “We wouldn't last in this coma two seconds.”

    “You're being petty!” Chris argued. “You just don't want to lose the machines or the salvage.  For God's sake, Arthur, we're talking about Libra here.  Human lives!”

    “I won't do it! That was never on the agenda, Chris.”

    Elina watched as they bickered. “Boys, please.  Boys!”

    They did not pay attention to her.

    She put her head down and faced the floor, well aware of what had to be done.

    Chris continued his quarrel, saying, “A few lousy automatons, Arthur.  This rock will kill us all! Think about the sacrifice.”

    “I won't disable our chances in the event we do make it and have to do repairs within the engineering sublevels.  You know as well as—” He stopped, dropping his mouth.  He poked Chris and directed his attention to the monitor televising the primary hull. “Elina!”

    The fembot was now outside the ship, inches away from the rocket boosters, a dozen or so droids with her.  She looked into the fuzzy, damaged camera.  She gave a half-smile and waved her set of tools. “I'm sorry, boys,” she said. “Human life is more precious.”

    Arthur was still in amazement. “Wh—what's she doing?”

    Chris saluted her, replying to Arthur: “Her job.” He slightly lifted the ship's nose and detached the explosives into the center of the doomsday rock. “And ours.”

    The asteroid exploded and began to roll up like a gravel dune.  In its wake were large numbers of small meteorites, the innocent kind, and from the top of the hull, Elina caught a final flashing glimpse of both light and darkness. 

    With the help of Chris and Arthur, the fembot had done it. 

    Doomsday was finally over, and the Libra colony saved.

                                                                                                                END.