Suddenly the darkness appeared malignant, concealing hosts of savage brute-men, unguessable horrors. There was the feel of movement out there. He heard something grunt and thrash in the underbrush followed by a squealing noise like a stuck pig. He shivered, glanced at the photo-electric chronometer. The sun had set at nine hours, Earth time, he saw. It was fifteen o'clock now. He had ascertained the rotation of the planet while still out in space and knew it wouldn't be light for three hours yet. He set himself to the task that had occupied him during every leisure moment since the warp had hurled the Mizar beyond the known regions of space--charting the stars in an effort to locate himself. But he couldn't concentrate. He kept listening subconsciously for any untoward sound of the world outside. * * * * * His real name was Jones RV860-09-34271. The Jupiter had been pinned on because he had been marooned once on that planet for three months and had lived to tell about it. There were two things which Jupiter especially didn't like. He didn't like men; and he didn't like women. He prided himself on being self-sufficient and tough--and he was tough, morally tough, and physically and intellectually tough. He had grown up in the stews of Venusport, fending for himself since the age of nine. Because he'd never seen the stars, he'd had one consuming ambition--to go to space. He had studied, worked and fought his way through the Galactic Colonization Board's Institute of Technology. The Institute was a hard school. The men of the advance exploratory units, the special corpsmen, had to be well versed in all sciences from astro-physics to zoomorphology. No one had believed that Jupiter could make it. Briggs, who had been an upper classman, had ridden him unmercifully. All of which had merely crystallized his determination. In the end he'd graduated with top honors. It was the same sort of determination that sustained him at this moment. Jupiter had long since reached the dismaying conclusion that the Mizar had been swept entirely beyond the local system, even beyond any of the adjacent star clusters. That was the final straw that had caused Briggs to crack. At the thought of Briggs, Jupiter Jones spat into the waste chute and arranged his lank frame before the powerful electronic telescope with which all the ships of advance exploration were equipped. But he didn't use it right away. Instead, he gazed upward at the star-encrusted heavens. The milky way, he saw, began down near the horizon, though it climbed less than a third of the way up into the sky. The rest of that tremendous path was blotted out by an inky blackness. He tugged at his beard. There was something familiar about that black pall, and he turned to the star charts again. Sure enough the "rift", a dark nebula, split the milky way from the constellations of Centaurus to Cygnus!