have deduced the presence of the burn,
but it was the least of his worries. The internal damage that had been
done to the ship was by far the more serious. It could, quite possibly,
kill him.

The Nipe, of course, had no intention of dying. Not out here. Not so far,
so very far, from his own people. Not out here, where his death would be
so very improper.

He looked at the ball of the yellow-white sun ahead and wondered that such
a relatively stable, inactive star could have produced such a tremendously
energetic plasmoid that it could still do the damage it had done so far
out. It had been a freak, of course. Such suns as this did not normally
produce such energetic swirls of magnetic force.

But the thing had been there, nonetheless, and the ship had hit it at high
velocity. Fortunately, the ship had only touched the edge of the swirling
cloud, otherwise the entire ship would have vanished in a puff of
incandescence. But it had done enough. The power plants that drove the
ship at ultralight velocities through the depths of interstellar space had
been so badly damaged that they could only be used in short bursts, and
each burst brought them nearer to the fusion point. Most of the
instruments were powerless; the Nipe was not even sure he could land the
vessel. Any attempt to use the communicator to call home would have blown
the ship to atoms.

The Nipe did not want to die, but, if die he must, he did not want to die
foolishly.

It had taken a long time to drift in from the outer reaches of this sun's
planetary system, but using the power plants any more than absolutely
necessary would have been fool-hardy.

The Nipe missed the companionship his brother had given him for so long;
his help would be invaluable now. But there had been no choice. There had
not been enough supplies for two to survive the long fall inward toward
the distant sun. The Nipe, having discovered the fact first, had, out of
his mercy and compassion, killed his brother while the other was not
looking. Then, having eaten his brother with all due ceremony, he had
settled down to the long, lonely wait.

Beings of another race might have cursed the accident that had disabled
the ship, or regretted the necessity that one of them should die, but the
Nipe did neither, for, to him, the first notion would have been foolish,
and the second incomprehensible.

But now, as the ship fell ever closer toward the yellow-white sun, he
began to worry about hi