ies they would be wiped out in a few months. Therefore the ship's
crew couldn't conceive of abandoning their ship. No matter what kind of
trouble she got into, they couldn't leave her. When the ship died, so
did their world.

With this kind of thinking, there was no need to keep the lifeboats
fueled. Not all of them, at least. Though it stood to reason at least
one of them held fuel for short flights that would have been wasteful
for the parent ship. At this point Jason's chain of logic grew weak. Too
many "ifs." _If_ they used the lifeboats at all, one of them should be
fueled. _If_ they did, it would be fueled now. And _if_ it were
fueled--which one of the six would it be? Jason had no time to go
looking. He had to be right the first time.

His reasoning had supplied him with an answer, the last of a long line
of suppositions. If a boat were fueled, it should be the one nearest to
the control cabin. The one he was diving towards now. His life depended
on this string of guesses.

Behind him the door went down with a crash. Kerk bellowed and leaped.
Jason hurled himself through the lifeboat port with the nearest thing to
a run he could manage under the doubled gravity. With both hands he
grabbed the emergency launching handle and pulled down.

An alarm bell rang and the port slammed shut, literally in Kerk's face.
Only his Pyrran reflexes saved him from being smashed by it.

Solid-fuel launchers exploded and blasted the lifeboat clear of the
parent ship. Their brief acceleration slammed Jason to the deck, then he
floated as the boat went into free fall. The main drive rockets didn't
fire.

[Illustration]

In that moment Jason learned what it was like to know he was dead.
Without fuel the boat would drop into the jungle below, falling like a
rock and blasting apart when it hit. There was no way out.

Then the rockets caught, roared, and he dropped to the deck, bruising
his nose. He sat up, rubbing it and grinning. There was fuel in the
tanks--the delay in starting had only been part of the launching cycle,
giving the lifeboat time to fall clear of the ship. Now to get it under
control. He pulled himself into the pilot's seat.

The altimeter had fed information to the autopilot, leveling the boat
off parallel to the ground. Like all lifeboat controls these were
childishly simple, designed to be used by novices in an emergency. The
autopilot could not be shut off, it rode along with the manual controls,
temperin