The other man looked at him strangely, then smiled pityingly. "You musta been lookin' the wrong way when the recruiters came around, then. Those birds'll do anything for ten thousand bucks." * * * * * They came to the end of the long corridor and approached another door--and suddenly Conroy remembered. He had been drunk, that last night on Earth--and suddenly everyone in the bar had run madly out the door, into the washroom, hid anyplace they could. Two men had entered. Recruiters. Space-station recruiters. Conroy remembered protesting mildly through a vague blue of alcohol and synthojoy, then letting them take him away. Sober now, he recalled having heard of such things. The space-stations needed men--and they'd grab them any way they could. They'd take uncomplaining derelicts when the supply of convicts ran out. His fiancee Janet had told him, when she broke their engagement, "Your drinking'll kill you some day, Dave." The words had been prophetic--though not the way she meant. The final door opened--and eight shambling, patchy-fleshed, almost bald wrecks of men came toward them. Dave shuddered. This was what a year of continuous hard radiation could do, even through tough shielding. This was what he'd look like a year from now. Already he imagined he could feel the subatomic particles ripping through his body, even though he knew it was only an illusion. The radiation wouldn't begin to affect him for a few days--but even now he felt his skin tingling and itching from force of suggestion. _I've got to get out of here_, he thought with a clarity he'd not known since he began drinking. _I'm still young. I don't want to rot down here._ _God, why couldn't I have been sober that night?_ The eight jetmen looked like lepers. Through lipless mouths they greeted the newcomers. Their voices were dry and whispering, as if their vocal cords had succumbed to the radiation too. Conroy had been a scientist ... once. Conroy, more than any of the six convicts he had been shipped with, knew what sort of agonies lay ahead. He turned. The door had irised shut behind him, erecting an invulnerable barrier between him and freedom. He studied the door while the loathsome once-men greeted the men who would replace them at their deadly task. It looked fairly familiar; it was almost like--by space, it _was_!--an ultron-relay door. A door Dave Conroy had helped to design, he and his partner Lloyd Regan, back before the terrible lab accident that had killed Regan and set Conroy to drinking. Moving unobtrusively away from the group, he edged to the door. Yes--it _was_ an ultronic door, he confirmed on close inspection. And that meant-- Hands that had once been those of a skilled engineer felt along the smooth metal for the emergency-hatch, found the microscopic depression built into the cupralloy for use in case the delicate ultronic mechanism of the door failed. His finger nestled in the slot for an instant--