the passenger compartments had opened; likewise the
blastoff drums had been ejected automatically, and were orbiting free.

Maybe it was Gimp who moved ahead of him. Looking out, Frank saw what
was certainly Ramos, already straddling a drum marked with a huge red
M.R., riding it like a jaunty troll on a seahorse. He saw the Kuzaks
dive for their initialled drums, big men not yet as apt in this new game
as in football, but grimly determined to learn fast. The motion was all
as silent as a shadow.

Then Frank jumped for his own drum, and found himself turning slowly
end-over-end, seeing first the pearl-mist curve that was the Earth, then
the brown-black, chalk-smeared sky, with the bright needle points and
the corona-winged sun in it. Instinct made him grab futilely outward,
for the sense of weightlessness was the same as endless fall. He _was_
falling, around the Earth, his forward motion exactly balancing his
downward motion, in a locked ellipse, a closed trajectory.

His mind cleared very fast--that must have been another phase of the
devil-killer shot coming into action. Controlling panic, he relocated
his drum, marked by a splashed red F.N., set his tiny shoulder ionic in
operation, and reached back to move its flexible guide, first to stop
his spin, then to produce forward motion. He got to the drum, and just
clung to it for a moment.

But in the next instant he was looking into the embarrassed, anguished
face of a person, who, like a drowning man, had come to hang onto it for
dear life, too.

"Frank, I--I even dirtied myself..."

"So what? Over there is your gear, Two-and-Two--go get it!" Frank
shouted into his phone, the receiver of which was now full of sounds--a
moaning grunt, a vast hiccuping, shouts, exhortations.

"Easy, Les," Reynolds was saying. "Can you reach a pill from the rack
inside your chest plate, and swallow it? Just float quietly--nothing'll
happen. We've got work to do for a few minutes... We'll look after you
later... Cripes, Mitch--he can't take it. Jab the knockout needle right
through the sleeve of his Archer, like we read in the manuals. The
interwall gum will seal the puncture..."

Just then the order came, maddeningly calm and hard above the other
sounds in Frank's phone: "All novices disembarked from GOs-11 and -12
must clear four-hundred mile take-off orbital zone for other traffic
within two hours."

At once Frank was furiously busy, working the darkened stellene of his
bubb