ne another through the etheric transmitters inside
their helmets. They could live ... if this was living ... a long time,
if only a man's brain would hold up, Russell thought. The suits were
complete units. 700 pounds each, all enclosing shelters, with
atmosphere pressure, temperature control, mobility in space, and
electric power. Each suit had its own power-plant, reprocessing
continuously the precious air breathed by the occupants, putting it
back into circulation again after enriching it. Packed with food
concentrates. Each suit a rocket, each human being part of a rocket,
and the special "life-gun" that went with each suit each blast of
which sent a man a few hundred thousand miles further on toward
wherever he was going.

Four men, thought Russell, held together by an invisible string of
gravity, plunging through a lost pocket of hell's dark where there had
never been any sound or life, with old Dunbar the first in line,
taking the lead because he was older and knew where he was and where
he was going. Maybe Johnson, second in line, and Alvar who was third,
knew too, but were afraid to admit it.

But Russell knew it and he'd admitted it from the first--that old
Dunbar was as crazy as a Jovian juke-bird.

A lot of time had rushed past into darkness. Russell had no idea now
how long the four of them had been plunging toward the red-rimmed sun
that never seemed to get any nearer. When the ultra-drive had gone
crazy the four of them had blanked out and nobody could say now how
long an interim that had been. Nobody knew what happened to a man who
suffered a space-time warping like that. When they had regained
consciousness, the ship was pretty banged up, and the meteor-repeller
shields cracked. A meteor ripped the ship down the center like an old
breakfast cannister.

How long ago that had been, Russell didn't know. All Russell knew was
that they were millions of light years from any place he had ever
heard about, where the galactic space lanterns had absolutely no
recognizable pattern. But Dunbar knew. And Russell was looking at
Dunbar's suit up ahead, watching it more and more intently, thinking
about how Dunbar looked inside that suit--and hating Dunbar more and
more for claiming he knew when he didn't, for his drooling
optimism--because he was taking them on into deeper darkness and
calling their destination Paradise.

Russell wanted to laugh, but the last time he'd given way to this
impulse, the results ins