cy medical kit. Trembling he held it in his hand as he
floated in free fall.

It was a little red key--a key to Earth, to life and to the chance to
ram every cold, precise, contemptuous word down his father's
over-analytical mouth.

He didn't really hate the old man but he knew that he feared him. He
feared also that his father might be right about him after all. Who in
his own mind, he thought bitterly, should know a son better than that
son's own father.

A quick surge of elation swept over him as he swam quickly to the
Tele-screen and switched it on. It wasn't a bit like saying good-bye to
an old friend, he thought, as he gazed at the flaming prominences not so
far below him. After a while he switched the instrument off and swam
triumphantly back to his bunk.

There were some tri-dimensional color slides in the ditty bag hanging by
his bunk. He took them out and looked at them. None of them were of his
father.

The girl was there, though. She was a small, cute girl with a rainbow of
laughter wreathed about her. She hadn't been really important before,
but she sure was important now that he was going to live. His old man
had foretold that, too.

After a little while he put the slides back in the portable holder and
broke open the plastic box. It contained a gleaming hypo filled with
what looked like a small quantity of water. There was an odd
peppermint-like odor about it.

There were no instructions. Just the needle and the little red box.

He wondered how many hours he would have to wait before help would come.
But that didn't matter. He would be asleep, anyway.

The temperature had climbed. It was burning, roaring hot.

Gently he slid the needle into his arm and depressed the plunger....

* * * * *

The MR4 continued to spin even more lazily in space. Her sun-blackened
hull, pitted by the glancing blows of by-passing meteor fragments, was
slowly overheating. Her refrigeration units were gradually breaking down
under their tremendous overload.

She was inching in ever-shortening circles always in the direction of
the massive, molten globe not so far below....

Sometime later, Hal Burnett awakened slowly, as if from some distant and
dimly-remembered dream. The haze of a deep and foggy sleep clung to the
unfamiliar mass that was his mind.

A distant alarm bell had rung deep within the primitive, subcortical
levels of his brain. It had rung--but not loudly nor insistent