he body of the key still in the
lock. Nobody would unjam it in the next four minutes.

Then he began to run up the stairwell toward the good lifeboat.

He was panting and out of breath when he arrived, but no one had stopped
him. No one had even seen him.

He clambered into the lifeboat, made everything ready, and waited.

The signal bombs were not heavy charges; their main purposes was to make
a flare bright enough to be seen for thousands of miles in space.
Fluorine and magnesium made plenty of light--and heat.

Quite suddenly, there was no gravity. He had felt nothing, but he knew
that the bombs had exploded. He punched the LAUNCH switch on the
control board of the lifeboat, and the little ship leaped out from the
side of the greater one.

Then he turned on the drive, set it at half a gee, and watched the
STS-52 drop behind him. It was no longer decelerating, so it would miss
Earth and drift on into space. On the other hand, the lifeship would
come down very neatly within a few hundred miles of the spaceport in
Utah, the destination of the STS-52.

Landing the lifeship would be the only difficult part of the maneuver,
but they were designed to be handled by beginners. Full instructions
were printed on the simplified control board.

* * * * *

Clayton studied them for a while, then set the alarm to waken him in
seven hours and dozed off to sleep.

He dreamed of Indiana. It was full of nice, green hills and leafy woods,
and Parkinson was inviting him over to his mother's house for chicken
and whiskey. And all for free.

Beneath the dream was the calm assurance that they would never catch him
and send him back. When the STS-52 failed to show up, they would think
he had been lost with it. They would never look for him.

When the alarm rang, Earth was a mottled globe looming hugely beneath
the ship. Clayton watched the dials on the board, and began to follow
the instructions on the landing sheet.

He wasn't too good at it. The accelerometer climbed higher and higher,
and he felt as though he could hardly move his hands to the proper
switches.

He was less than fifteen feet off the ground when his hand slipped. The
ship, out of control, shifted, spun, and toppled over on its side,
smashing a great hole in the cabin.

Clayton shook his head and tried to stand up in the wreckage. He got to
his hands and knees, dizzy but unhurt, and took a deep breath of the
fresh air that was