"There is space-craft in Sector 180, Jubil," it was Radik again, "Racon has just reported it. But they'll miss you by at least ten parsecs. Have you changed your mind?" "No." "Very well." Jubil could see the pulsing of the _Mercury's_ drives, now. Radik was taking no chances on the strange ship still light years away from his stern being patrol. "Good news for you, Jubil. You are in the gravitational field of an asteroid. You can't see it, yet; it's directly above you. But you'll drift to it and cling like a snail on a stone for as long as time itself. Good-bye, Jubil." Strange, Jubil thought, that there was no anger in him now. There should be oxygen enough for a good two hours yet, so this eerie ennui could not be the prelude to a rising carbon dioxide quotient. A normal man would be bitter, perhaps even hysterical in his anger and his fear of death. Yet there was only this peaceful drifting toward the still-invisible asteroid that hung in space above his own head. Jubil closed his eyes, shutting out the phosphorescence of the velvet that was space. The exhaust of the _Mercury II_ might still be in sight. If so, it was not visible through the restriction of the plastic face-plate of Jubil's suit. Jubil found himself wondering where Kane could have drifted since the captain's inert body had been shoved out of the _Mercury II's_ access door. Perhaps, even now, it was bound, like a rudderless ship, toward the selfsame asteroid that would be Jubil's last and permanent home. Thinking of Kane, Jubil remembered also Schoenbirk, the erratic genius whose mathematical theorizing was used in the design of the Schoenbirk-Halsted De-Fouling Gear. Had it been years, or lifetimes ago, when the three of them had been undergraduates together at the Academy? Schoenbirk, working with the high electrostatic potentials necessary to insure the exhaust of opposite-sign waste from the complex guts of the atomic drive had been blown to pieces by the accumulation of the very thing his device was designed to prevent. Random electrical forces gathering around the discharge ring until their workable mass became great enough to enter and initiate a chain reaction in the fuel storage tank. Along with Schoenbirk had gone even the tremendously heavy concrete walls of the laboratory. All that, however, had been after Jubil had washed out of the Academy and gone into the space-freighters as a Drive-Engineer. In the intervening years, Jubil had become thoroughly familiar with the perfected Schoenbirk-Halsted.... Kane! There was a man who had made the Academy his own playground. Kane had passed with the greatest of ease, worked his way through astro-navigation, the Allen Drives, space-time computations.... * * * * *