He saw briefly the flare of the jet reflected off the remnants of his cloud of station stores before deceleration with all its unpleasantness began. The lip of the cylinder's mouth swept up past his helmet as he was rammed deep into the absorbent mass of ribbon chute. This wasn't a padded contour chair under a mild 3G lift. The chutes took the first shock, but Johnny took the rest the hard way, standing bolt upright. He found with some surprise his head was right down through the neck ring and inside the suit proper, his arms half withdrawn from the sleeves, knees buckled to an almost unbelievable angle considering the dimensions of the lower case. He had time to hope fervently the cheap expendable motor wouldn't burn out its throat and send him cart-wheeling through space, or blow the surrounding tanks before the blackout came down. He came out of it sluggishly, to find the relief from the dreadful pressure almost as stupefying as the deceleration itself. While his conscious mind screamed the urgency of immediate action, his bruised and twisted body answered but feebly. The condition of complete weightlessness and the springy reaction of the ribbon mass was all that allowed him finally to claw himself out of the cylinder to where he could use the suit jet without fear of burning the precious chutes. He was so tired. His muscles of their own accord seemed to relax intermittently, interfering with the control of his movements. Only the sudden sight of the Earth, transformed by a weird illusion of position from a bright goal to an enormous, distorted thing, looming, apparently, over him with glowing menace, spurred his flagging resolution to frantic activity. He jetted straight back trailing his string of chutes behind him, then, before the last was free of the cylinder, kicked himself around to assume the original course once more. At this stage it was no longer possible, even granted the time, to judge visually how near he was to the atmosphere. The uneasy feeling that he must already be brushing the Troposphere jarred his nerve so that he merely gave himself a short flat-out boost in the right direction before spinning bodily one hundred eighty degrees so that he was traveling feet first. Reflected in the curved helmet face, the string of chutes obediently followed-my-leader around a ragged U-shape, the last--the small pilot-chute trailed limply around as he watched. There could surely be but a few seconds left before the grand finale. Johnny found he was unconsciously holding his breath, and, as he deliberately inhaled long slow draughts of his already staling air, realized abstractly that he seemed to be attempting to meet his possible end with some degree of dignity if not with resignation, and wondered if he were the exception or the rule. Possibly, he thought sardonically, because there is so little room for dignity in our living years, and was mildly surprised at an uncharacteristic excursion into the realm of philosophy.