Determined to hold up through the high-G even though nobody watched, he went on and on and up and up, his radio voiced the progress tinnily. Shock followed roaring pressure, release followed shock. Orientation was lost; only logic and intellect told him where he was and which way he was going. Then he was free. Free to eat and drink and read and smoke one cigarette every three hours and, in essence, behave in about the same way as a prisoner confined in solitary. The similarity did not bother Jerry Markham, for this was honor, not punishment. Huvane collected him with the ease of a fisherman landing a netted crab. Easily, painlessly. Shockingly, for the crab doesn’t exactly take to the net with docility. Huvane collected the whole shebang, man and machinery; then opened the spacecraft with the same attitude as a man peeling the lid from a can of sardines. He could have breached the air lock, but he wanted the Terran to understand the power behind the act. Jerry Markham came out blinking; very mildly wondering about the air. It was good. Without considering the rather high probability that nobody spoke the language, he blurted: “What gives?” He was not very much surprised when one of them in uniform said curtly, “This way and make it snappy, Terran!” No, he was not surprised. He was too stunned to permit anything as simple as surprise. And through the shock and the stun, his months of training came through. Jerry Markham worried his first worry: _How was he going to get the word back home?_ Confinement in the metal cell of his top-stage hadn’t bothered him. The concept of landing on a planet that couldn’t come closer to home than some twenty-seven million miles was mere peanuts. Isolation for a year was no more than a hiatus, a period of adventure that would be rewarded many-fold. Sally? So she might not wait but there were others; he’d envisioned himself fighting them off with a club after his successful return. Hell, they’d swarmed him before his take-off, starting with the moment his number had come up as possible candidate. No, the meeting with competence in space did not shock him greatly. What bothered him was his lack of control over the situation. Had he seen them and passed on about his business, he recounted the incident. As it was, his desire to tell somebody about it was cut off. As he sat, alone and helpless, it occurred to him that he did not mind so much the dying, if that was to be his lot. What mattered was the unmarked grave. The mourning did not move him; the physical concept of “grave” and its fill of moldering organic substances was nothing. It was mere symbol. So long as people knew how and where, it made little difference to Jerry Markham whether he was planted in a duridium casket guaranteed to preserve the dead flesh for a thousand years or whether he went out in a bright swift flame that glinted in its tongues of the color-traces of incandescent elements of human organic chemistry.