. All frozen up in space ... preserved like a
piece of meat in a cold storage locker. And then maybe in a million
years or so some lousy insect man from Jupiter comes along and finds
you and takes you away to a museum...."

"Shut up!" Johnson yelled.

Dunbar laughed. "Boys, boys, don't get panicky. Keep your heads. Just
stick to old Dunbar and he'll see you through. I'm always lucky. Only
one way to go ... an' that's straight ahead to the sun with the
red-rim around it ... and then we tune in the gravity repellers, and
coast down, floating and singing down through the clouds to
paradise."

After that they traveled on for what seemed months to Russell, but it
couldn't have been over a day or two of the kind of time-sense he had
inherited from Earth.

Then he saw how the other two stars also were beginning to develop red
rims. He yelled this fact out to the others. And Alvar said. "Russ's
right. That sun to the right, and the one behind us ... now they ALL
have red rims around them. Dunbar--" A pause and no awareness of
motion.

Dunbar laughed. "Sure, they all maybe have a touch of red, but it
isn't the same, boys. I can tell the difference. Trust me--"

Russell half choked on his words. "You old goat! With those old eyes
of yours, you couldn't see your way into a fire!"

"Don't get panicky now. Keep your heads. In another year, we'll be
there--"

"God, you gotta' be sure," Alvar said. "I don't mind dyin' out here.
But after a year of this, and then to get to a world that was only
ashes, and not able to go any further--"

"I always come through, boys. I'm lucky. Angel women will take us to
their houses on the edges of cool lakes, little houses that sit there
in the sun like fancy jewels. And we'll walk under colored fountains,
pretty colored fountains just splashing and splashing like pretty rain
on our hungry hides. That's worth waiting for."

Russell did it before he hardly realized he was killing the old man.
It was something he had had to do for a long time and that made it
easy. There was a flash of burning oxygen from inside the suit of
Dunbar. If he'd aimed right, Russell knew the fire-bullet should have
pierced Dunbar's back. Now the fire was gone, extinguished
automatically by units inside the suit. The suit was still inflated,
self-sealing. Nothing appeared to have changed. The four of them
hurtling on together, but inside that first suit up there on the front
of the gravity rope, Dunbar was dead.