I thought desperately of pounding on that impervious stone door, in the chance that my suffocation was an over-sight on their part. But I knew in my heart it wasn't. I held myself on the cot, fighting that deadly tug of irrational emotion. If I was going to suffocate, I wanted to do it with as little pain as possible. My lungs, though were telling me a different story. They had that "time to go up for air" feeling, the hideous pre-strangulation hot wave that floods through the ribs, begging, and then ordering, the swimmer to head to the surface before his lungs rip apart. I fought the feeling, breathing faster to keep that dull nudging from becoming a full-scale command. But it was harder and harder not to fling myself at that bare store and try, in the last few minutes of life, to dig my way free with my fingertips. And then, with my eyes burning in my own perspiration, and tongue half-protruding between gaping lips, I felt that stinging, prickling sensation along my limbs. Then a blinding blaze of blue-white sparks showered me, and I jumped to my feet in fright. The wall opposite the cell door was raggedly missing, its three-foot slabs of granite jutting wildly into the area where their companions had just been. And there was air; cold, chilling air, terribly thin to breathe. But it was air, and I leaped through that gap like a madman, flooding my hot lungs with the elusive draughts of black Martian night. I staggered, dizzy at the sparseness of the atmosphere, and then a tight clamp closed upon my arm and kept me from falling. A three-fingered clamp. I looked into the glittering face of the sugarfoot. It had the collapser in its free hand, and its eyes were locked on mine. It was waiting for me to say something. "Brother," I said, managing a grin, "I would love coming with you, no matter where!" Surprisingly, it shook its dragon head, and made gestures toward my blouse, then an upward movement of its arms. "You want me to take it off?" I said, in bewilderment. "But I'm half frozen already." The sugarfoot was adamant. Again it pointed to the blouse, and did that slip-it-over-your-head motion. I gave up fighting it. The creature was obviously not inimical to me. Even if it were, I thought, I owed it something for pulling me out of that stone coffin. Hoping pneumonia was less painful than outright suffocation, I obediently tugged it, loose from within my belt, and slid the thing over my head and off. The sugarfoot took it from me, turned it inside-out, and held it out close to my face for inspection, in the dim criss-cross lighting of tiny Phobos and barely larger Deimos, as they scurried across the cold black sky.