his calls
to an insane howling of intermixed pleas, threats, condemnation--a sewer
flood of foul vilification against those who had betrayed him.

Bright and beautiful, Earth rolled blandly beneath him, the sun was a
remote impersonal thing and the stars mocked silently. After a while the
radio carried only the agonized sounds of a man who had forgotten how to
cry and must learn again. There were times after this when he observed
incuriously a parade of mind pictures, part memory, part pure
hallucination and containing nothing of reason; other times when he
thought not at all. The sun appeared to dwindle, retreating and fading
far away into a remote place where there were no stars at all. It became
a feeble candle, guttered unsteadily a moment and suddenly winked out.
Abruptly Johnny was asleep.

* * * * *

He opened his eyes and surveyed the scene with an oddly calm and
dispassionate curiosity, not that he expected to find his status changed
in any way but because he had awakened with a queer sense of unreality
about the whole business. He knew vaguely that he'd had a bad time in
the last few hours but could remember little of the details save that it
was like one of those fragmentary nightmares in the instant between
sleeping and waking when it is difficult to divide the fact from the
dream. Now he must reassure himself that this facet of it was real and
when he had done so, realized with a faint shock that he was no longer
afraid.

Fear, it seemed, had by its incessant pressure dulled its own edge. The
acceptance of inevitable death was still there, but now it seemed to
have little more significance than the closing of a book at the last
page.

It is possible that Johnny was not wholly sane at this point, but there
is no one to witness this and Johnny, not given to introspection at any
time, felt no spur to self-analysis, beyond a brief mental registration
of the fact.

So he made his visual survey, saw that it was real, nothing had changed;
noted with mild surprise that he'd somehow remained in the shadow of his
screen this time. He had lost track of time entirely but the suit's air
supply telltale was in the yellow indicating about two hours more or
less to go on breathing. In quick succession he reviewed the events,
accepted the probability of the abandoned search without a qualm and
made his decision. There was no need to wait about any longer.

A quick flip of the helmet