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recorders. What had the ship encountered that might explain that brutal deflection? What had the auto-matic sensors recorded?
    The responders began kicking out tape almost immediately—much too fast.
    “Data error,” Flattery said, reading the output over Bickel’s shoulder.
    In abrupt fury, Bickel pulled the master override stop from his core switch, jammed a set of jumper jacks across the AAT controls, opened the core system for standard reference comparison.
    “You are into the core!” Flattery said, his voice sharp with fear. “You have no guide fuse or master reference. You could louse up the command routines.”
    “Unhook that!” Timberlake shouted, lifting his head from the cocoon clamps to glare across at Bickel.
    “Shut up, both of you. Sure, the core is delicate, but something in there is already loused up—bad enough to kill us.”
    “You think you have time to check some eight hundred thousand routines?” Timberlake demanded. “Don’t talk nuts!”
    “There are specific injunctions against what you are doing,” Flattery said, fighting to keep his voice reasonable. “And you know why.”
    “Don’t try to tell me my job,” Bickel said.
    While he spoke, Bickel rolled over core memory responders, direct contact, doing it gently to avoid current backlash.
    “You make one mistake,” Timberlake said, “and it would take six or seven thousand technicians with a second master system and several thousand imprint relays to repair the damage. Are you ready to—”
    “Stop distracting me!”
    “What are you looking for?” Flattery asked, interested in spite of his fear. He had realized that Bickel, conditioned to deep inhibitions against turning back, was incapable of doing anything to deprive them of one of their basic tools.
    “I’m checking availability of peripherals from the core memory,” Bickel said. “There’s got to be a bypass or pileup somewhere. It’ll show in the acquisition and phase-control loops of the input.” He nodded toward a diagnostic meter on his board. “And here we are!” The meter’s needle slammed against its pin, fell back to zero, stayed there.
    Slowly, Bickel ordered a master diagnostic routine into direct contact, put the core standard back on fused auxiliary, began rolling the troublesome core-memory section. Wor-king with only occasional references to the core standard, he forced the routine through the data-reference channels as modified by new sensor input.
    Error branchings began clicking from his responders. Bickel translated aloud as the code figures appeared on the screen above his board.
    “Core memory/prediction region rendered inactive. Pro-ton mass and scatter relative to ship course/mass/speed did not agree with prediction.”
    Aside, Bickel said, “We’re hitting something other than hydrogen and hitting it in unexpected concentrations—partly because of our speed/mass figure.”
    “Solar winds,” Timberlake whispered. “They said we—”
    “Solar winds, hell!” Bickel said. “Look at that.” He nodded at a code grouping as it worked its way across the screen.
    “Twenty-six protons in the mass,” Timberlake said.
    “Iron,” Bickel said. “Free atoms of iron out here. We’re getting a plain old-fashioned magnetic deflection of the grav field.”
    “We’ll have to slow the ship,” Timberlake said.
    “Nuts!” Bickel was emphatic. “We’ll put a fused overload breaker in the G system. I don’t see why the devil the designers didn’t do that in the first place.”
    “Perhaps they couldn’t conceive of any force large enough to deflect the system,” Flattery said.
    “No doubt,” Bickel’s voice was heavy with disgust. “But when I think a simple cage switch with a weight in it could have prevented Maida’s death …”
    “They depended on the OMCs’ reflexes, too,” Flattery said. “You know that.”
    “What I know is they thought in straight lines when they should’ve been thinking in the round,” Bickel