* * * * *

For an interval Hawk Carse knew nothing. He had ceased to live, it
seemed, and was soaring through Eternity. He never knew how much time
passed before his numbed senses began to return and he became aware of
weight and of a furious roaring in his head.

He was moving forward at blinding speed. Something kept flashing before
him--a wide stream of ruddy orange light: his dazed brain could connect
it with nothing he had ever known. Soon the orange stream settled into
spasmodic bursts, pitch blackness filling the intervals; and when it
came more slowly he saw that it was in reality the vast flaming ball of
Jupiter, streaking across the line of vision as he tumbled over and
over, head over heels--free in space!

The realization helped his return to alertness. As the wild tumbling
motion gradually ceased, and Jupiter tended to stay more and more under
his feet, he peered around through his face-plate. To one side he
glimpsed two grotesque, bulky figures, one half of them limned glaringly
against the blackness of space by the near-by planet's light. He saw
other figures, too, spread out in a scattered fringe--figures of men in
smocks, dead and bloated and white.

They were the coolies, these last, and the other two were of course
Leithgow and Friday. But had they survived the outrush of air? Carse
felt in his left glove for the suit's gravity control lever; found it
and tentatively moved it. His acceleration slowly increased. He brought
the lever part-way back. Then, into the microphone encased inside the
helmet, he called:

"Leithgow! Leithgow! Can you hear me? Friday!"

The radio broadcast his words. Soon welcome answers came in Eliot
Leithgow's tired voice and the negro's emphatic bass.

"Maneuver together," Carse instructed them. "We must lock arms and stay
close."

* * * * *

Slowly, clumsily, the three monstrous figures made toward each other,
and presently they were reunited in a close group. Carse pointed an arm
into the face of Jupiter where there hung poised a gleaming globe of
white, dappled with dark splotches.

"Satellite III," he said, "--our goal. And we'll get there without
interruption now that Ku Sui, his laboratory, his coordinated brains,
are destroyed.... You are very quiet, Eliot. Aren't you happy at our
success?"

"I am very tired," the old scientist said. "Oh, but we'll sleep and
feast and game when