just aft of the rocket mouths was hotter still. There the splashing
rocket flames bathed it in intolerable incandescence. Hull plates,
braces and beams glared white----

The tip of the tail caved in. The ship's empty cargo space was
instantly filled with air at intolerable pressure and heat.

The hull exploded outward where the rocket flames played. There was a
monstrous, incredible jerking of the cabin that remained. That fraction
of the ship received the full force of the rocket thrust. They could
decelerate it at a rate of fifteen gravities or more.

They did.

Joe lost consciousness as instantly and as peacefully as if he had been
hit on the jaw.

An unknown but brief time later, he found himself listening with a
peculiar astonishment. The rockets had burned out. They had lasted only
seconds after the separation of the ship into two fragments. Radars on
the ground are authority for this. Those few seconds were extremely
important. The cabin lost an additional half-mile per second of
velocity, which was enough to make the difference between the cabin
heating up too, and the cabin being not quite destroyed.

The cabin remnant was heavy, of course, but it was an irregular object,
some twenty feet across. It was below orbital velocity, and
wind-resistance slowed it. Even so, it traveled 47 miles to the east in
falling the last 10 miles to Earth. It hit a hillside and dug itself a
70-foot crater in the ground.