"Sure--snap, if you breathe shallow and don't drink anything. Helps to have a couple of spare tanks." He could still try to chuckle. "Well, hell, guy, let's get you over to my ship." "No can do, Ash. No sense to it." I was straining to hear the words now, even with his set right next to mine, I knelt down and touched helmets with him. "Listen, Ash--he's got the stuff. The diagrams, the charts, the figures--everything. He's even got the tech detail to put it together for him." "All right, Lou. It figured. But can the yak. Come on, boy, over my shoulder you go, and down to the can with you." "Lemme lay! Goddam it, quit tryin' to move me! I didn't walk over here--I got flung when the dome let go!" He was screaming. "Sorry, Lou!" "S'all right." He bubbled a chuckle. "I see by my infallible little TSN instruments that I'm gonna run outta breathin' material 'na couple minutes. 'S'all right by me. Luck to ya, Ash." "Yeah." But he didn't strangle. He didn't choke in his helmet; there was still air in his tanks when he died. * * * * * I went back to my ship and sat behind the control board, smoking a cigarette. I rubbed a hand across my tired eyes, and wondered what I was going to do next. Thorsten had thought of everything. He couldn't have found technicians to assemble the drive anywhere else, so he'd come out here and kidnapped them. That was an elementary move, obviously planned far in advance. I'd been running a useless race. I would have realized it long ago, if I hadn't been half-crazy about Pat. She laughed at me when I told her about it, but she laughed in a peculiar way. "I could have told you," she said, laughing. "Ash Holcomb, the big undercover agent, heading like mad for Titan! And what does he find?" "I found Lou Foster, Pat," I said, feeling the steel in my voice slicing upward in my throat. "That wasn't anybody's fault!" she said quickly. "He happened to get in Harry's way." "Go tell Andrea Foster," I said. "Stop it, Ash! You can keep bringing up horrible examples, but it still doesn't mean anything, compared to travel to the stars." "What was wrong with the way it was going to be done?" I asked. But she was pulling her protective shell of mockery around her again. "Oh, stop it, Ash! You're licked, and now you're trying to justify it by claiming foul, the way losers always have." But the last thing she said, as I slammed out of the cabin, was: "This time, you got the spanking, Ash. Now stop crying about it." But somehow, she didn't sound as happy as she'd probably expected. I took the ship back out into space, finally, heading Sunward. All I could do was hope I'd get within radio range of a TSN ship before Thorsten found me. But that didn't happen. I wasn't anywhere near the Belt when I had to sit and watch Thorsten's fleet come flaming at me out of space and surround my ship, sliding into tight courses that held me on a deadly and invisible leash.