Bombs Awry by George O. Smith

Hours passed. Velocity mounted. The missile was still dogging their tracks. It stayed about two hundred yards back, retreating a bit under the lash of the pressors and coming up between thrusts. Its average distance had not changed.

The worry and concern over a possible failure was almost gone. With nothing to do but fret, the crew to a man had spent their time buttering up their hastily-rigged circuits. The first electronic switch had been augmented by another one and semi-connected, so that in case of a failure in the first the second would cut in with no more than one single sequence of failure. Men sat over the Lanson generators, watching. The back covers were off and set aside and the crew worked over them with test equipment. Voltages and currents were read from point to point and the alignment was under constant observation. Parts were replaced by the techniques once started by the telephone companies of an early Terrestrial Era, who learned how to transfer the lines from one cable to another, and from one central office switchboard to another, without causing the man who might be using one of the lines to suspect that his voice had suddenly changed its route.