dozens of them, and
they all looked alike. His head wasn't working and his eyes kept seeing
gray fog. Why, he knew this gadget by heart! He'd practically built most
of it, and he'd checked it out half a dozen times.

Something was wrong inside the control box, but he couldn't put his
finger on it.

He checked carefully, tracing the wiring with blurred eyes. Then, in a
moment of clarity, he saw it! Someone had put an alligator clip in the
box. It was clamping a wire to a terminal post. He shook his head.
Pretty sloppy work. It made no sense at all to use a clip on a permanent
wiring job. Who had done it? Didn't he know the clip was apt to vibrate
off during the flight?

The grayness slipped away again and he recognized the circuit. Of
course! He had found the bypass. The wire ran from the main, incoming
signal circuit into the master control circuit. The Earthman had done
this! What he had done was to feed the signal from the blockhouse right
back to the blockhouse over the check-signal circuit, completely
bypassing the drone control, which was still in operating condition but
which now could not get the signals to activate it.

Rick studied the control carefully. He had to restore the circuit, but
he couldn't for the life of him figure how to do it. Normally, before
the crushing acceleration, he would have recognized the difficulty in a
flash. Now his confused mind had to labor through steps that sometimes
took him off on a wild tangent.

The rocket was slowing rapidly now. It reached maximum altitude and
hesitated briefly.

One side of the rocket was brilliant with sunlight--raw, unfiltered
light not meant for human eyes. The other side was black. On the sunny
side, the rocket was heating from absorbed solar energy. On the dark
side, the heat was radiating off. But the radiation was less than the
absorption of energy, and the rocket was growing appreciably warmer.

For an instant the rocket paused, nearly three hundred miles above the
earth. The space frontier was below--almost halfway back to earth. Out
here was the vacuum of space.

Rick wasn't conscious of this. He wouldn't have cared. His whole
attention was focused on the problem of the drone control. He didn't
even realize the rocket had started the downward trip until he found
himself floating upward. Then, frantically, he hauled himself back down
to the control box, ignoring the stabbing pain in his stomach as he bent
over again, one leg wrapped arou