"Any spaceman knows what a forty-five million mile trip in a lifeboat means, you mug," the lieutenant replied. "But I'd rather die quickly in a crash landing than to face what the Venusians probably have thought up for us when they whittle us down to their size." "By gad! You're both heroes." "Umph!" said Captain Bonnet, who had been a hero before. "What's that?" "I was about to say: we'd better get started. It's getting late." "Good! Take a detail to your ship and get the lifeboat ready. Then you and the lieutenant get some rest. I'll call you in an hour for the takeoff." * * * * * _The Piece of Sky's_ lifeboat was scarcely one hundred feet in length. It was powered by fourteen rocket valves, fed from detachable fuel containers, so arranged that as fast as a fuel drum was emptied it could be dropped from the rocket. The ship was streamlined from the nose to tail, but it was flattened on the bottom, so that either of two possible types of landing maneuvers could be attempted. Attempted was the correct word, for lifeboats of space ships were never the last word in navigable machines. They were to be used only as a last resort under desperate circumstances. No lifeboat had ever been built as a machine for lengthy interplanetary travel. But the universe is foolproof to a certain extent. Any piece of matter is sure to obey the laws of the universe. Captain Bonnet supposed that if the lifeboat succeeded in taking off, and if it were put on the right orbit, it could reach the earth in time to send reinforcements back to Venus. As Captain Paul Bonnet and Lieutenant Bill Riley took their places in the ship, Major Rogers explained that the craft had been equipped with a small parachute to be used just before the lifeboat crashed in dropping a message to authorities that Outpost 53 had been attacked and that reinforcements were needed. "After you drop the message, you men are on your own," the major explained. "You mean we're to try to get out of it, if we can?" asked Captain Bonnet dryly. "Humph!" A few minutes later the lifeboat's rockets roared and the craft soared upward through Venusian clouds to deliver a message to Terra. Captain Bonnet watched the rockets drain the fuel tank on the takeoff. His gravity gauge told him that he was going to make it. Once beyond Venus and nosed toward the earth, which was approaching conjunction, no more fuel would be needed. The ship would be seized by terrestrial gravity and brought home. There would be a period of uncomfortable warmth as the sides of the ship became red hot in the earth's atmosphere. A few moments of frantic work dropping the parachute over some populous region of the earth, and then a crash that would mean the end.