The door cracked easily. There was air on the other side. Pendray breathed a sigh of relief, braced his good foot against the wall, and pulled the door open. The little lifeboat was there, nestled tightly in her cradle. For the first time since the _Shane_ had been hit, Pendray's face broke into a broad smile. The fear that had been within him faded a little, and the darkness of the crippled ship seemed to be lessened. Then the beam of his torch caught the little red tag on the air lock of the lifeboat. _Repair Work Under Way--Do Not Remove This Tag Without Proper Authority._ That explained why the lifeboat hadn't been used by the other crewmen. Pendray's mind was numb as he opened the air lock of the small craft. He didn't even attempt to think. All he wanted was to see exactly how the vessel had been disabled by the repair crew. He went inside. The lights were working in the lifeboat. That showed that its power was still functioning. He glanced over the instrument-and-control panels. No red tags on them, at least. Just to make sure, he opened them up, one by one, and looked inside. Nothing wrong, apparently. Maybe it had just been some minor repair--a broken lighting switch or something. But he didn't dare hope yet. He went through the door in the tiny cabin that led to the engine compartment, and he saw what the trouble was. The shielding had been removed from the atomic motors. He just hung there in the air, not moving. His lean, dark face remained expressionless, but tears welled up in his eyes and spilled over, spreading their dampness over his lids. The motors would run, all right. The ship could take him to Earth. But the radiation leakage from those motors would kill him long before he made it home. It would take ten days to make it back to base, and twenty-four hours of exposure to the deadly radiation from those engines would be enough to insure his death from radiation sickness. His eyes were blurring from the film of tears that covered them; without gravity to move the liquid, it just pooled there, distorting his vision. He blinked the tears away, then wiped his face with his free hand. Now what? He was the only man left alive on the _Shane_, and none of the lifeboats had escaped. The Rat cruisers had seen to that. * * * * * They weren't really rats, those people. Not literally. They looked humanoid enough to enable plastic surgeons to disguise a human being as one of them, although it meant sacrificing the little fingers and little toes to imitate the four-digited Rats. The Rats were at a disadvantage there; they couldn't add any fingers. But the Rats had other advantages--they bred and fought like, well, like rats.