't
stand it! But if I'm sent back--I can't ever live with myself!..."

Frank felt the intense anguish of trying to decide somebody else's
quandary that might be a life or death matter which would surely involve
them all. Damn, weak-kneed kid! How had he ever gotten so far?

"We should have set up his bubb first, put him inside, and spun it to
kill that sense of fall!" Gimp said. "We'll do it, now! He should be all
right. He _did_ pass his space-fitness tests, and the experts ought to
know."

With the three of them at it, and with the Kuzaks joining them in a
moment, the job was quickly finished.

Meanwhile, the sharp, commanding voice of Ground Control sounded in
their phones, again: "GOs-11 and -12 returning to port. Is all in order
among delivered passengers? Sound out if true. Baines, George?..."

David Lester's name was called just before Frank Nelsen's, and he
managed to say, "In order!" almost firmly, creating a damnable illusion,
Frank thought. But for a moment, mixed with his anger, Frank felt a
strange, almost paternal gentleness, too.

At the end of the roll call, the doors of the GO rockets closed. Stubby
wings, useful for the ticklish operation of skip-glide deceleration and
re-entry into the atmosphere, slid out of their sheaths. Little, lateral
jets turned the vehicles around. Their main engines flamed lightly;
losing speed, they dipped in their paths, beginning to fall.

Watching the rockets leave created a tingling sense of being left all
alone, at an empty, breathless height from which you could never get
down--a height full of dazzling, unnatural sunshine, that in moments
would become the dreadful darkness of Earth's shadow.

"Hey--our spare drum--it'll drift off!" Ramos shouted.

The Kuzaks dived to retrieve the cylinder. Others followed. But there
was a peculiar circumstance. The friction cover at one of its ends hung
open. There was a trailing wisp of stellene--part of the bubb packed
inside--and a thin, angry face with rather hysterical eyes, within the
helmet of an Archer Five.

"Shhh--it ain't safe for me to come out yet," Glen Tiflin hissed
threateningly. "Damn you all--if you dare queer me...!"

"Cripes--another Jonah!" Charlie Reynolds growled.

Frank Nelsen looked at the Kuzaks, floating near.

"Well--what could we do?" Joe Kuzak, the gentler twin, whispered. "He
came back to Jarviston, to our rooming house, one night. We promised to
help him a little. What are you going to do