nd the small pedestal that supported the
control.

Strength was coming back to him slowly, his normal resilience overcoming
to some extent the beating his body had taken. The grayness had thinned
somewhat. He was less inclined to slip off into semiconsciousness.

Again he examined the circuit. The essential wire that fed the drone
control the signals from the blockhouse was clipped to the terminal
post. All he had to do was unclip it and reconnect it to the
drone-control input.

He couldn't control his fingers accurately yet, and he made several
attempts to pull the alligator clip off the terminal post. Finally he
made it, and sank back exhausted from the physical effort.

Far below, in the blockhouse, the indicator light on the control panel
changed from green to red. Circuit not operating! Those in the
blockhouse had no way of knowing that it had been out of operation since
before the take-off. To them, the sudden switch in signal meant
something had gone wrong in flight.

Rick vaguely realized that the light must have changed, but he didn't
think about it. Now he had to find the proper terminal for the input
wire. He should know where it was. He had wired this circuit himself.
But try as he would, he could not find the contact.

The rocket was accelerating rapidly now, and its flight pattern was
changing slowly. Instead of dropping tail first, it was canting to one
side. In less than a minute it would be entering the outer fringes of
the atmosphere, in the region where friction against air molecules and
atoms would start heating the rocket.

Rick's flashlight beam probed the innards of the drone control. The
place from which the input wire had been ripped must be within easy
reach. Otherwise, the Earthman couldn't have disconnected it in what
must have been a short time. For another thing, it had to be within the
length of loose wire, because the Earthman had simply disconnected it,
then reconnected it in another place.

He was thinking more clearly now. He poked the loose wire around,
careless of possible shorts, and his luck held. A dozen times the bare
wire tip brushed within a tiny space of terminals that would have
shorted out the whole control.

He found the terminal.

The wire had been soldered into place. The Earthman must have used a
pair of needle-nose pliers to reach in and jerk it loose. There was a
channel in the solder where the tip had rested.

Rick tried to replace the wire, but the area