ith one trembling hand he reached out and
managed to hook the channel on which the marmoset's chair was hung. He
pulled himself erect. He had forgotten he was weightless. He kept right
on going until his head banged painfully on the bottom of the nose-cone
radar unit. The shock of pain, unlike the throbbing from the
acceleration, cleared his head and made him angrier.

Carefully now, he hauled himself down again. He patted the spacemonk as
he went by, an absent-minded, comradely gesture. He was intent on the
drone control in the center of the floor. The Earthman hadn't had much
time. Whatever he had done to sabotage the control must have been done
in a very few minutes.

Rick got into position, kneeling on the deck, steadying himself with one
hand. With the other he searched for his flashlight and found it hanging
from his belt. His head sagged, and had it not been for the
weightlessness he would have fallen forward onto the drone control. He
was in worse shape than he realized. Then, some inner warning signal
sounded, and he came back to consciousness with a start.

The startled reaction was enough to move him away from the drone control
and break his loose grip. He slid through the air back against the
bulkhead wall and felt the warmth that had not yet drained off into
space. It was the heat of rapid passage through the atmosphere.

He thought grimly that the heat would be much worse when the rocket
re-entered the atmosphere. Unless Jerry Lipton could somehow get
control, the plunging rocket would flame like a meteor.

He moved back to the drone control, using his hands as paddles. His
wrists were limp and his control was poor, but he made it. He had the
flashlight now, and he shot its beam into the maze of wiring.

The cut wire dangled, its end gleaming redly in the light beam. Cutting
the wire should have broken the circuit, but it hadn't. Why?

If the cut wire hadn't interrupted the circuit, that meant the circuit
had been bypassed. Rick was sure a signal had gotten to the blockhouse
somehow, showing that the drone control was operating.

He had it. Look for other cut wires. It didn't matter whether he found
the bypass circuit or not. The signal to the blockhouse wasn't important
for the moment, but getting the control back into operation was. He knew
the board must still show green down where Earle and Gould were sitting,
almost three hundred miles below.

Tracing the visible wires wasn't easy. There were