ous alterations in his trajectory that had brought
him within range of the Sun's mighty pull. He remembered also every
detail of the last and gravest of the series of miscalculations that had
swept him from the established route of the regular Venus-Mercury mail
run, and threatened him with a violent, flaming end.

Greatly off course, he had been approaching Mercury, a routine
thirty-six million miles from the Sun. On this, the final leg of his
long journey, he had deviated just far enough from the extreme limits of
safety to find himself and his ship gripped inexorably in the mighty
magnetic fields of the Sun's passage....

He remembered a name-- Josephine.

There would be no lover's meeting now on the green fields of Earth in
the dusk of a summer evening. There would be no such meeting now. Not
unless the prayers and dreams a boy and a girl had shared had followed
him, plunging senselessly into the cold glacial heart of interstellar
space.

His false bravado began to break and he began to weep quietly. He began
to wish with all his heart that he had never left home.

The sudden crackling of the almost static-jammed ultra-wave radio
snapped through to his mind. Quickly he began to free himself from the
bunk.

"MR4, come in, MR4."

An eternity seemed to pass as he floated across the room, deliberately
disregarding the strategically-placed hand-grips on the walls, floor,
and ceiling. It seemed aeons before he reached the narrow little control
compartment, and got the ultra-wave radio into action, nearly wrecking
it in his clumsy-fingered haste.

"MR4 to Earth. Over."

He waited a few moments and then repeated the message as no
acknowledgment came through. Then he abruptly remembered the nearby
presence of the Sun and its interference with radio transmission and
reception. He was white and shaken by the time his message was received
and his report requested and given.

He gave the whole tragic picture in frantic short wave. The amount of
atomic fuel left in the ship, the internal and external temperatures,
the distance from the Sun, and the strength of the solar disk's magnetic
field and his rate of drift toward it--along with a staggering list of
other pertinent factors.

At last it was over and he stood by awaiting the decision from Earth
headquarters.

It came at last.

"MR4." The growling voice was Donnelly's, the huge space-engineer in
charge of the smaller mail-rocket units. "You're in a tough spot