There was a sudden suffocating feeling in Conway’s lungs. Quickly he changed from the first oxygen tank to the second; then, with a knife that dangled on a string inside the basket he cut the rubber tubing of the first tank and hacked at the lashings that protruded into the car. The empty cylinder fell silently away; the balloon lunged upward gently, hesitated with a slight jerk, then went up again. Conway was dimly conscious that his radio was silent. He tuned it carefully, examined it at length without success. Finally he leaned over the side of the basket and looked down at the antenna--it was gone. Slowly he scrawled on his log: “Cyl. dropped. Broke antenna off; no more music.” He busied himself for some minutes with entries in his log, writing now in an unsteady hand, clumsily. He set down the time shown on the clock and the voltage being drawn from his batteries--anything he saw or anything he thought about recording to occupy his mind. Insidiously the numbness grew upon his body. He seemed unable to see his instruments clearly; he was like a drunken man, his vision blurred. Doggedly he shook his head, trying thus to clear his sight. His senses seemed all befuddled. Foolhardy though he knew the expenditure of energy to be--for he was not cold--he took to waving his mittened hands, clapping them together gently, as a freezing man might do when slipping into a fatal stupor in the cold. But that did no good; and he took up his pencil again and tried to make another entry in his log. His mind seemed to work in vagrant opposition to his will, disobeying reason and experience. He read his altimeter and his clock and thermometer. These readings he put down carefully, with painful labor. The altimeter registered thirty-eight thousand feet; it was three-twenty by the clock; the temperature was down to thirty-four below. He found the line on the log below where his last entry had been made. There was something distantly familiar about the figures already there and the ones he was trying to write; he fumbled in his mind to recall the connection--failed. Time passed now in endless throbs. His legs felt numb; his feet like slugs of lead that hung inside his fur-lined moccasins in curious detachment from his body. With difficulty now he made new figures on the paper. Wearily he glanced at other entries and wondered where he had seen them; he glanced at all his instruments and back to the log once more. Slowly realization came to him. There were three entries that gave the time of day as three-twenty! The clock, also, said three-twenty! He puzzled that; finally, through a blur, knew that the clock had stopped! He stared out into space, trying to collect his wits, incredulous. “The oil!” he thought. “How long ago?”