* * * * * A good half hour later the skipper's voice bellowed from the speakers all over the _Niccola_. His heavy-jowled features stared doggedly out of screens wherever men were on duty or at ease. "_Hear this!_" he said forbiddingly. "_We have checked our course and speed. We have verified that there is no possible jury-rig for our engines that could get us into any sort of orbit, let alone land us on the only planet in this system with air we could breathe. It is officially certain that in thirteen days nine hours from now, the _Niccola_ will be so close to the sun that her hull will melt down. Which will be no loss to us because we'll be dead then, still going on into the sun to be vaporized with the ship. There is nothing to be done about it. We can do nothing to save our own lives!_" He glared out of each and every one of the screens, wherever there were men to see him. "_But_," he rumbled, "_the Plumies can get away if we help them. They have no cutting torches. We have. We can cut their ship free. They can repair their drive--but it's most likely that it'll operate perfectly when they're a mile from the _Niccola's_ magnetic field. They can't help us. But we can help them. And sooner or later some Plumie ship is going to encounter some other human ship. If we cut these Plumies loose, they'll report what we did. When they meet other men, they'll be cagey because they'll remember Taine. But they'll know they can make friends, because we did them a favor when we'd nothing to gain by it. I can offer no reward. But I ask for volunteers to go outside and cut the Plumie ship loose, so the Plumies can go home in safety instead of on into the sun with us!_" He glared, and cut off the image. Diane held tightly to Baird's hand, in the radar room. He said evenly: "There'll be volunteers. The Plumies are pretty sporting characters--putting up a fight with an unarmed ship, and so on. If there aren't enough other volunteers, the skipper and I will cut them free by ourselves." Diane said, dry-throated: "I'll help. So I can be with you. We've got--so little time." "I'll ask the skipper as soon as the Plumie ship's free." "Y-yes," said Diane. And she pressed her face against his shoulder, and wept. This was at 01 hours, 20 minutes ship time. At 03 hours even, there was peculiar activity in the valley between the welded ships. There were men in space armor working cutting-torches where for twenty feet the two ships were solidly attached. Blue-white flames bored savagely into solid metal, and melted copper gave off strangely colored clouds of vapor--which emptiness whisked away to nothing--and molten iron and cobalt made equally lurid clouds of other colors. There were Plumies in the air lock, watching. At 03 hours 40 minutes ship time, all the men but one drew back. They went inside the _Niccola_. Only one man remained, cutting at the last sliver of metal that held the two ships together.