n is diverted to the companionway door, I may be able to get in.
It's our only chance--ours, and everyone's."

"But the spacesuit--"

"I know," Larry said even as he was climbing into the inflatable vacuum
garment. It was Larry--and it wasn't Larry. He felt a certain
confidence, a certain sense of doing the right thing--a feeling which
Larry Grange had never experienced before in his life. It was as if the
boy had become a man in the final moments of his life--or, he thought
all at once, it was as if Johnny Mayhem who shared his mind and his body
with him was somehow transmitting some of his own skills and confidence
even as he--Mayhem--had reached the decision to go outside.

"I know," he said. "The spacesuit isn't insulated sufficiently. I'll
have about three minutes out there. Three minutes to get inside.
Otherwise, I'm finished."

"But Larry--"

"Don't you see, Sheila? What does it matter? Who wants the five or ten
extra minutes if we're all going to die anyway? This way, there's a
chance."

He buckled the spacesuit and lifted the heavy fishbowl helmet, preparing
to set it on his shoulders.

"Wait," Sheila said, and stood on tiptoes to take his face in her hands
and kiss him on the lips. "You--you're different," Sheila said. "You're
the same guy, a lot of fun, but you're a--man, too. This is for what
might have been, Larry," she said, and kissed him again. "This is
because I love you."

Before he dropped the helmet in place, Larry said. "It isn't for what
might have been, Sheila. It's for what will be."

The helmet snapped shut over the shoulder ridges of the spacesuit.
Moments later, he had slipped into the airlock.

* * * * *

"I say you're a fool, Ackerman Boone!" one of the enlisted men rasped at
the leader of the mutiny. "I say now we've lost our last chance. Now
it's too late to get into the lifeboats even if we wanted to. Now all we
can do is--die!"

There were still ten conscious men in the subspace room. The others had
fallen before heat prostration and lay strewn about the floor, wringing
wet and oddly flaccid as if all the moisture had been wrung from their
bodies except for the sweat which covered their skins.

"All right," Ackerman Boone admitted. "All right, so none of us knows
how to work the subspace mechanism. You think that would have helped? It
would have killed us all, I tell you."

"It was a chance, Boone. Our last chance and you--"

"Just shut