his suit.

6

A good deal of that landing remained confused in Joe's mind. While it
was going on he was much too busy to be absorbing impressions. When he
landed, he was as completely exhausted as anybody wants to be. It was
only during the next day that he even tried to sort out his
recollections.

Then he woke up suddenly, with a muffled roaring going on all about him.
He blinked his eyes open and listened. Presently he realized what the
noise was, and wondered that he hadn't realized before. It was the
roaring of the motors of a multi-engined plane. He knew, without
remembering the details at the moment, that he and the other three were
on a plane bound across the Pacific for America. He was in a bunk--and
he felt extraordinarily heavy. He tried to move, and it was an enormous
effort to move his arm. He struggled to turn over, and found straps
holding his body down.

He fumbled at them. They had readily releasable clasps, and he loosened
them easily. After a bit he struggled to sit upright. He was horribly
heavy or horribly weak. He couldn't tell which. And each separate muscle
in his whole body ached. Twinges of pain accompanied every movement. He
sat up, swaying a little with the slow movements of the plane, and
gradually, things came back.

The landing in the ribbon-chute. They'd come down somewhere on the west
coast of India, not too far from the sea. He remembered crashing into
the edge of a thin jungle and finding the Chief, and the two of them
searching out Haney and stumbling to open ground. After laying out a
signal for air searchers, they went off into worn-out slumber while they
waited.

He remembered that there'd been a patrol of American destroyers in the
Arabian Sea, as everywhere under the orbit of the Platform. Their radar
had reported the destruction of one space ship and the frantic diving of
the other, its division into two parts, and then the tiny objects, which
flew out from the smaller cabin section, which had descended as only
ejection-seat parachutes could possibly have done. Two destroyers
steamed onward underneath those drifting specks, to pick them up when
they should come down. But the other nearby destroyers had other
business in hand.

The two trailing destroyers reached Goa harbor within hours of the
landing of the four from space. A helicopter found the first three of
them within hours after that. They were twenty miles inland and thirty
south from Goa. Mike wasn't lo