"Impossible to escape?" He chuckled, repeating their babble. "That's what _I_ thought too, until I remembered those data tables on gravity and Escape Velocity and such--how, on the Moon, the Escape Velocity is much less than on Earth. And on that tiny second moon--well, my clue was when I threw a stone into the air _and it never came back_." Dan gulped hot coffee. "I got off the moonlet myself then, got up to more than a mile above it where I was free of its feeble gravity. But I was still in the same orbit circling Earth. I'd have continued revolving as a human satellite forever, of course, but for this emergency gadget hooked to my belt." Dan held up the metal gun with its empty tank and needle-nose half burned away. "Reaction pistol. Fires hydrazine and oxidizer, ordinary jet-rocket principle. Aiming it toward the stars, opposite earth, its reactive blasts shoved me Earthward, thanks to Newton. I needed a speed of about one-half mile a second. The powerful little jet gun had only my small mass to shove in free space, without gravity or friction. That broke me from free-fall _around_ Earth to gravity-fall _toward_ Earth. "Then I spiraled down under gravity pull. I reached lung-filling air density just in time, before my oxygen gave out. One more danger was that I began heating up like a meteor due to air friction. I flung out a prayer first, followed by my twin parachutes, designed for extreme initial shock. They held. Slowed me to a paratrooper's drift the rest of the way down." "Wait," a puzzled pilot objected. "Your story doesn't hang together. _How_ did you get off that moonlet? How did you get up there, a mile above it, away from its gravity? There was nobody to throw _you_, like a stone." "I threw myself," said Dan. "First I ran as fast as I could, maybe halfway around that moonlet, to get a good running start. And then--" Dan Barstow's grin then was undoubtedly the biggest grin in history.... "Well, then, since the feeble gravity couldn't pull me back again, what I really did was to _jump clear off that moon_." Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from _Fantastic Universe_ March 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.