The startled reaction was enough to move him away from the drone control and break his loose grip. He slid through the air back against the bulkhead wall and felt the warmth that had not yet drained off into space. It was the heat of rapid passage through the atmosphere. He thought grimly that the heat would be much worse when the rocket re-entered the atmosphere. Unless Jerry Lipton could somehow get control, the plunging rocket would flame like a meteor. He moved back to the drone control, using his hands as paddles. His wrists were limp and his control was poor, but he made it. He had the flashlight now, and he shot its beam into the maze of wiring. The cut wire dangled, its end gleaming redly in the light beam. Cutting the wire should have broken the circuit, but it hadn't. Why? If the cut wire hadn't interrupted the circuit, that meant the circuit had been bypassed. Rick was sure a signal had gotten to the blockhouse somehow, showing that the drone control was operating. He had it. Look for other cut wires. It didn't matter whether he found the bypass circuit or not. The signal to the blockhouse wasn't important for the moment, but getting the control back into operation was. He knew the board must still show green down where Earle and Gould were sitting, almost three hundred miles below. Tracing the visible wires wasn't easy. There were dozens of them, and they all looked alike. His head wasn't working and his eyes kept seeing gray fog. Why, he knew this gadget by heart! He'd practically built most of it, and he'd checked it out half a dozen times. Something was wrong inside the control box, but he couldn't put his finger on it. He checked carefully, tracing the wiring with blurred eyes. Then, in a moment of clarity, he saw it! Someone had put an alligator clip in the box. It was clamping a wire to a terminal post. He shook his head. Pretty sloppy work. It made no sense at all to use a clip on a permanent wiring job. Who had done it? Didn't he know the clip was apt to vibrate off during the flight? The grayness slipped away again and he recognized the circuit. Of course! He had found the bypass. The wire ran from the main, incoming signal circuit into the master control circuit. The Earthman had done this! What he had done was to feed the signal from the blockhouse right back to the blockhouse over the check-signal circuit, completely bypassing the drone control, which was still in operating condition but which now could not get the signals to activate it. Rick studied the control carefully. He had to restore the circuit, but he couldn't for the life of him figure how to do it. Normally, before the crushing acceleration, he would have recognized the difficulty in a flash. Now his confused mind had to labor through steps that sometimes took him off on a wild tangent. The rocket was slowing rapidly now. It reached maximum altitude and hesitated briefly.