nd trying to conserve
it--the life of everyone aboard depended on his reaching the
atmospheria. For the air in the spaceship was rapidly degenerating,
becoming unbreathable as what remained of the good stuff was inhaled and
thrown off as useless gases....

Either the atmospheric system had gone on the blink by itself, he
thought, which was a hell of a long shot and too much of a coincidence,
or else the alien, experimenting, had turned it off by accident.

Maybe the brute didn't need oxygen. Of course he didn't! His brothers
outside sure didn't have any. Then, if he were independent of it, but
could stand living in it, the probabilities were that he didn't breathe
at all; that his metabolism was geared to ignore the elements in which
he lived.

Just possibly he was taking this way to kill them off in a particularly
fiendish fashion.

Silently Pink cursed the architect who had designed the _Elephant's
Child_ with the armaments room in the bow and the atmospheria back near
the crew's sector, a thousand feet of passageways off. Every door he
flung open took another bit of strength from his aching limbs. As he
passed a mirror, he had a glimpse of his face. His face was flushed now,
the grim-set lips were bluish, his eyes seemed to bulge from his head.

He began breathing through his mouth. It may have been imagination, but
he thought the air had a foul taste, like a sea full of putrid fish.

Pink fell to his knees. Abruptly his strength had waned to almost
nothing. He was horrified to realize how swiftly the air was going bad.
He had to get to the system! He struggled up, staggered forward like a
drunk. His heart, pounding wildly a moment before, now seemed to be
slowing, weakening.

He found himself singing....

"_Blast off at two, jet down at three
On the dead dry dusty sphere
What sort of a life is this for me,
A veteran rocketeer?_"

Great God, was he crazy? Singing, shouting the words to that old song
that Circe had brought back to his mind. Using up what amounted to his
last drops of energy and air. God, God, help me, he thought wildly; make
me shut up. But the maddened outer part of his brain kept him singing.

"_I, who have seen the flame-dark seas,
Canals like great raw scars,
And the claret lakes and the crimson trees
In the rich red soil of Mars!_"

Then he fell, and this time he could not get up.

He would lie here and die, horribly, gasping for breath where there