One side of the rocket was brilliant with sunlight--raw, unfiltered light not meant for human eyes. The other side was black. On the sunny side, the rocket was heating from absorbed solar energy. On the dark side, the heat was radiating off. But the radiation was less than the absorption of energy, and the rocket was growing appreciably warmer. For an instant the rocket paused, nearly three hundred miles above the earth. The space frontier was below--almost halfway back to earth. Out here was the vacuum of space. Rick wasn't conscious of this. He wouldn't have cared. His whole attention was focused on the problem of the drone control. He didn't even realize the rocket had started the downward trip until he found himself floating upward. Then, frantically, he hauled himself back down to the control box, ignoring the stabbing pain in his stomach as he bent over again, one leg wrapped around the small pedestal that supported the control. Strength was coming back to him slowly, his normal resilience overcoming to some extent the beating his body had taken. The grayness had thinned somewhat. He was less inclined to slip off into semiconsciousness. Again he examined the circuit. The essential wire that fed the drone control the signals from the blockhouse was clipped to the terminal post. All he had to do was unclip it and reconnect it to the drone-control input. He couldn't control his fingers accurately yet, and he made several attempts to pull the alligator clip off the terminal post. Finally he made it, and sank back exhausted from the physical effort. Far below, in the blockhouse, the indicator light on the control panel changed from green to red. Circuit not operating! Those in the blockhouse had no way of knowing that it had been out of operation since before the take-off. To them, the sudden switch in signal meant something had gone wrong in flight. Rick vaguely realized that the light must have changed, but he didn't think about it. Now he had to find the proper terminal for the input wire. He should know where it was. He had wired this circuit himself. But try as he would, he could not find the contact. The rocket was accelerating rapidly now, and its flight pattern was changing slowly. Instead of dropping tail first, it was canting to one side. In less than a minute it would be entering the outer fringes of the atmosphere, in the region where friction against air molecules and atoms would start heating the rocket. Rick's flashlight beam probed the innards of the drone control. The place from which the input wire had been ripped must be within easy reach. Otherwise, the Earthman couldn't have disconnected it in what must have been a short time. For another thing, it had to be within the length of loose wire, because the Earthman had simply disconnected it, then reconnected it in another place.