I looked at Clair and Clair looked at me, and then we both looked at Gramps. He shrugged eloquently enough, and after taking one last angry look at the three men within our dome, we turned and walked away. The angry looks made them smile, as we left one of them even thumbed his nose at us. That gesture, too, was eloquent. It said, _suckers!_ We retreated to the base of my pinnacle of rock, where we couldn't be seen from either dome. What had happened was simple. In my enthusiasm I had left our dome deserted, and apparently our trio of friends back there had found it that way. The dome-locks, of course, are manipulated from within, and there's no way to secure them from the outside. So the trio had walked in, closed the lock behind them, and we were stuck out on the cold, dark, airless surface of 4270. I tried to scratch my head and nearly succeeded in cracking my helmet with a leatheroid glove. Gramps and Clair had gone out before me: they had perhaps an hour's air supply left. Maybe I had three, with luck. The Karden didn't have enough air within its old hulk now to satisfy a lungfish in suspended animation, and by the time we could get its old generators working again, we'd be three asphyxiated corpses. So, we could do two things. We could wait out in the open like sitting ducks and wait for the unknown enemy to take us, or we could just sit here near our pinnacle of rock and suffocate. I cursed myself soundly, but I stopped and tried to comfort her when I saw that Clair was crying. It isn't easy, not through a spacesuit and not when you think you'll be dead in not much more than minutes. Gramps felt the fear too, he was muttering to himself. Clair murmured. "Jerry.... Oh, Jerry ... I don't want to die!" * * * * * I had to think fast. I had to think faster than I ever thought in my life, and generally I like to explore my way around a problem, looking at it from all angles. But the air left for Gramps and Clair could be measured in minutes now, and mine wasn't much more. I said, "What are you worrying about? George and Harry and the other boys will have that thing rigged up in a couple of hours, sure. We'll give those guys in both domes a little bit of hell. Won't be a one left alive." I tried to make the butterflies remain in my stomach, to have them go anyplace but in my voice. It almost didn't work. Clair and Gramps looked at me like I might be crazy or something, and I raised a gloved finger up and tried to line it up in front of my mouth to tell them to shut up. Gramps said, "George and Harry?" "Of course. They found it half an hour ago, and now they're setting it up. Just a matter of time, so relax." I squatted down on my hands and knees, making the gesture for silence again. I found a jagged little rock and started to trace lines in the powdery pumice. It was messy, but they could understand it. I wrote: