Sam half-rose and gripped the table. "Look, my lovely one, _I'm_ the gent who brings home that weekly paycheck you can't get along without. Measly or not, it's good, honest American dough that lets us live a little decently--and the least _you_ could do is give me warm coffee in the morning!" His voice had risen almost to a shout and Sam himself was surprised at it. Dorothy's eyebrows crept into a bewildered frown, and like one in a trance she moved to turn on the heat beneath the coffee pot. Sam's heart was beating swiftly as he sat down. Conditioned responses, he thought a little wildly. He'd started it off last night by defying Dorothy--and now, bit by bit, it was becoming easier. All he'd have to do was keep it up, see that he didn't lapse. He sipped the coffee slowly, as if tasting his recent triumph in the black liquid. "You'd better hurry," Dorothy said, looking at him a little uneasily. Sam glanced at the wall clock and began gulping the hot liquid. Ten of eight! He'd have to hurry. He paused suddenly, the cup in mid-air, and wondered. Hurry to what? To those two wires and the tester and the endless stream of untested engines flowing toward him? With an infinite firmness, Sam Meecham placed his cup on the saucer. "I'm not going in," he said. Dorothy looked at him as though he were crazy. "What do you mean, you're not going in?" she demanded. "Just because you've got some mulish notion in your head, do you think we have to starve? You're going in and liking it." "The engine I bought is coming today," he said in a quiet voice. "I want to install it." In Sam Meecham's eyes there was a deadly fire that even his wife had not seen before. She gulped and backed away a little. "But--" "Call up the foreman," Sam said. "Tell him I'm sick. No, wait." He paused, smiling coldly. That would leave him an out; he could always go back to the job if he changed his mind. He said slowly, "Tell him I've quit." "_Sam!_" "Tell him I've quit," Sam insisted. That was the thing. Burn your bridges behind you so you can't turn back, so the only road is ahead. Sam Meecham was going to the stars, and he would never return! The atomic engine came that afternoon, neat and shiny and sleek, with all the wires in their proper places, checked and double-checked by a sober human cog in the prison from which Sam Meecham had just escaped. Sam busied himself in the hangar, lifting out the old engine and replacing it with the new one. Carefully, he settled it into its housing and bolted it down. Then he rearranged the wires into the pattern outlined on the sheet of paper. Dorothy brought him coffee. That surprised him but he accepted it gratefully. "Can--can I help you, Sam?" she offered. He looked at her, perhaps a little disappointed that her face was serious. He said, "Sure you're not just trying to be nosey?" A sharp pain darted into her eyes and she turned away. "Wait," he said.