plintered. The rocket splintered. But Dan was not there to be
splintered likewise. He had jammed down a button, at the critical
moment, and the rocket's emergency escape-hatch had ejected him a
split-second before the violent impact.

But Dan blacked out, receiving some of the concussion of the exploding
rocket. When his eyes snapped open he was floating like a feather in
open, airless space. His rubberoid space suit, living up to its rigid
tests, had inflated to its elastic limit. But it held and within its
automatic units began feeding him oxygen, heat and radio-power. He had a
chance, now, because he had been ejected cleanly from the rocket,
without damage to the protective suit.

The stars wheeled dizzily around him. Dan finally saw the reason why. He
was not just floating as a free agent in space. He was circling the
black moonlet, at perhaps a thousand yards from its pitted surface.

"Hello, Rough Rock," he called. "Still alive and kicking, sir. Only now,
of all crazy-mad things, _I'm_ a moon of _this_ moon! The collision must
have knocked me clear out of my down-to-Earth orbit.... I must have been
ejected in the same direction as the moonlet's course, in its gravity
field.... I don't know. Let an electronic brain figure it out some
time.... Anyway, now I'm being dragged along in the orbit of the
moonlet--how about _that_? Yes, sir, I'm circling down closer and closer
to the moonlet.... No, don't worry, sir. It was a weak gravity pull,
only a fraction of an Earth-g. So I'm drifting down gently as a
cloud.... Stand by for my landing on Earth's second moon!"

The bloated figure in the bulging space suit circled the black stony
surface several more times, in a narrowing spiral, and finally landed
with a soft skidding bump that didn't even jar Dan's teeth. He bounced
several times from a diminishing height of fifty-odd feet in grotesque
slow-motion before he finally came to a stop.

He sat still for a moment, adjusting to the fantastic fact of being
shipwrecked on an unchartered moonlet, crowding down his pulse rate
which might be over ten percent normal now.

"Okay, Rough Rock, I hear you.... You're telling me, sir?... Obviously,
I'm _marooned_ here. No rocket to leave with. No way to get back to
terra firma ... what? If you'll pardon my saying so, sir, that's a silly
question.... Of course I'm scared! Scared green. Sorry about the rocket,
sir, losing it for you.... Me, sir? Thank you, sir. But stop
apologizing