"What are you thinking about?" I asked again, and then as realization came, I added angrily: "Never mind that! I know what you're planning Bat, and you can forget it! I'll get this can down all right!" The voice from the interphone was dry as dust. "Like hell you will. Who are you kidding?" I had no answer there. Without UVR to guide me, I was blind. I didn't have a chance to get the _Eagle_ down, and we both knew it. "I'm coming up," Bat said, "The automatics can take care of things down here now." I glanced at the chronometer. Twenty-two minutes to go. Bat was right. The autos could carry on in the tuberoom now. I felt them cut into the circuit. My heart was heavy as I called a craneman into control to handle the equipment. Together we unlimbered a pressure-suit from the locker. Then I found the skipper's rations and uncorked a bottle. In a moment Bat was in Control. When I saw him my stomach muscles tightened. He looked as though he'd been broiled. His face was a swollen mass of angry flesh and his clothes were seared into his hide. Every movement must have been sheer hell for him, but he staggered into the suit and made himself fast to the Control crane. Before calling for the steelglas helmet, he reached thirstily for the skipper's bottle and took a long pull. "Ahhh," he breathed, "That's fine stuff ... real fine." He offered me the bottle, grinning painfully. "Have one on me, Morley...." * * * * * I let the fiery liquor drive down the lump that was sticking in my throat and handed Bat the bottle. He finished it in two swallows, looked at it regretfully, and tossed it aside. It landed in the corner of Control where it lay, rocking senselessly back and forth with the jolting movements of the boat. Bat fastened his helmet on and started for the valve. I wanted to reach out and stop him, but I couldn't. I wanted to say something to him ... but what? How do you thank a man for buying your life with his own? What do you say to pay a man for his pain and his torture? That's right. You don't say anything. And neither did I. You just stand there and watch, with your heart a lump of lead inside you. I did that, and no more. He turned toward me just as the inner valve closed on him and the cable he dragged behind him. "See ya," he said with a clumsy wave. And then he was outside in that radioactive mist of death, riding the crane out and down. Hanging by a thin cable in that stinking fog and using his useless mutational powers to save the hides of his ship and shipmates ... _and_ the load of weather-plant that meant food to the stay-at-homes. The mass-ratio altimeter gave its last reading--four miles--and then it was through, its sensitive coils thrown out of phase by the mass of the planetary globe under us. Here, now, was where UVR should have taken over. But there was no UVR. Only a man hanging at the end of a cable in a glowing mist that was burning his last chance of life out of him.