More apprehensive than ever, Dollard finally yielded to his fears and surrendered his controls to the robot pilot. His huge body rendered almost weightless, he pulled himself along the rail guards of a catwalk that led to the unmanned engine room. Here he inspected every instrument dial to be found although the readings on many of them were repeated on duplicates in the bow.

It was then, while the ship was still a thousand miles from the no-pull point where free-wheeling alone had been known to carry vessels out of Terra's gravitational range and into Venus' orbit, that disaster struck. The fuel being fed to exactly half of the rocket tubes choked out, and the blast from the remaining tubes increased proportionately.

Under this new impetus, the vessel's frame shuddered. Its nose suddenly described a wild arc among the gyrating stars. The diversion of inertia was a more severe blow than a meteor collision would have been. Thrust was an exceedingly difficult thing to plot in free s.p.a.ce.

Dollard, screaming in panic, was flung against a network of metal braces; despite his weightlessness, his ma.s.s was great as ever and a sharp steel corner gouged a deep bleeding slash in his puffy cheek.

Sickened, he crawled forward through the spinning ship until he was once more able to pull himself up into the pilot's chair.

There, he discovered the second battery of tubes had ceased firing about a minute after the first. But the changed vectors had already done their damage to both ship and heading.

A quick run-through on the course-calculator soon revealed to Dollard how desperate his position was. Mathematically, Venus was now a goal impossible to attain. To re-correct his altered heading would require more fuel than his tanks had carried at take-off, thanks to sabotage.

He also had the vast gravitational field of the sun to battle--a powerful sucking force, which if left to work its will could grow insidiously from a gentle tug of a few millimeters per second to a powerful acceleration eighty times terrestrial escape velocity--and this, without ever once relinquishing its hold on the slightest particle of ma.s.s in its grip.

Cursing and fuming, Dollard plotted and re-plotted, some of the rustiness of his brain wearing off as he matched his wits against the prospect of death by holocaust. But, all the resources of higher mathematics failed to point toward a solution. An artery commenced to throb painfully above his ear.

It was Garth who had engineered this hideous accident, he told himself. The faithful unsuspecting Garth had turned out to be a traitor. He was the one who had rigged the fuel lines so that at a certain predicted point along the course the flow along one set of conduits would be shunted to the other.

He should have killed Garth instead of merely stunning him, Dollard thought angrily.

For the twentieth time, he fed three-body calculations into the astro-computer. Somehow, somewhere, in the maze of the Newtonian science there had to be an answer. The complexities of force and heading a.n.a.lysis weren't so great but what machinery could eventually solve all the variables involved. That is, if only Sol's overwhelming gravitational attraction didn't provide a free-sliding path to h.e.l.l with no choice of alternates in the meanwhile....

The _click-click_ of the tape as it emerged from the electronic calculator seemed to present a different rhythm to Dollard's ears on the twenty-first try. Picking up the ribbon, he let his reddened eyes run over the printed symbols, translating them into finished equations. Elation suddenly sent his blood pressure soaring, as the meaning of what he read became apparent. There was a solution ... a course he could follow! One, which while it would not guide him to Venus, would prevent him from plunging into the sun.

Eagerly, he punched the figures for the heading onto a magnetized wire that would be fed into the gyropilot. After the heading was set, he crawled toward the ship's stern, dragging with him a hydrojet welding torch, a tool that could sear metal apart or join it by causing regulation of the molten rod protruding from its spring barrel. In the abdomen of the vessel, he found the wrecked fuel lines and removed the obstruction Garth had set up, repairing the channels.

Returning to the pilot chamber, he pressed the firing b.u.t.ton and acceleration returned a form of gravity to the ship's interior, giving him weight for the first time since the freakish accident.

Sighing with relief as the heavens slowly rotated in his screen, Dollard slumped back in his chair. He punched new figures into the computer, thinking ... now once safely back into a no-pull zone, a man with a little luck should be able to make--

His chunky fingers froze to the keys. There was another flaw to be dealt with. The discrepancy was one the course-calculator had clearly pointed out, but he had overlooked it in his haste to get underway.

The solution he had followed was the only possible one--that was still quite true. But, use of it only plunged him into a second predicament.

This new course, said the equations, a course which would require all the remaining fuel to maintain, would steer the ship into a permanent orbit around the earth--an ellipse with the point of apogee far beyond Luna. He now had the certainty of continued life--for a few more days, until his provisions gave out....

Again he cursed the name of Garth. But for the man's treachery he would be well on his way to Venus. Now, he was a helpless trapped ma.s.s of protoplasm, protected from his bitter airless environment only by the same steel walls of the cage that held him....

Throughout the next twenty-four hours, as the nature of the elliptical orbit he had entered became more and more apparent, Dollard fought off sleep while his frightened brain racked and racked again its scattered fund of knowledge for an answer to the new problem.

But at last, the narcosis of cellular exhaustion completely overcame him and he slept.

When he awoke, he was chilled and hungry. The ship had pa.s.sed into the shadow of Luna and its bulkheads no longer conducted heat to the convecting air envelope inside from the outer plates, generally warmed by solar radiations. It took him sometime to get warm again.

He pondered anew his predicament. It would be useless to plead for help to the Terran s.p.a.ce authorities. All interplanetary flights had been grounded since the Asiatics had scattered the epidemic over the western world only to have it re-invade their own borders; all the national governments were fighting rebellion and plague simultaneously, and most important of all as far as Dollard was concerned, he had effectively outlawed himself from the jurisdiction of all governments by his acts of murder and his treason in fleeing Terra. No, there could be no help from the officials of earth.

Not in present years anyhow, he thought. But, wait! Suppose this plague should ultimately die out or be conquered. Then, wouldn't s.p.a.ce travel be resumed? If not by the human race, by its successor--whichever race or species, if such could happen, that mutated successfully enough to produce a plague resistant strain and then evolved a rational brain.

Civilizations rose and toppled in cycles, he knew. Sometime in the near future or even the far future, another civilization would emerge on Terra and another race would conquer the stars.

But what value was that to him, if he would die in a few days from lack of oxygen?

No, if he were to be rescued, it had to be soon. By the Venusian colonists? No hope lay there, either. The second planet was an infant world, and its people--even if they succeeded in making s.p.a.ce travel common--would be apt to avoid the Earth-Luna system like the--

He choked: There was no other word for it:--like the plague....

Again, he was conscious of his brief chill. It aroused some elusive connection in his brain with a piece of information he had nearly forgotten. What was it? Cerebration set in, as he sought to pin down the clue he wanted.... He felt his body chilling....

_Chilling_, he thought. That was it, _deep freezing_.

What cold was colder than the eternal absolute zero of outer s.p.a.ce?

Where could a person find temperatures lower than those in the celestial icebox that extended everywhere around him? Just outside his port window lurked enough chill to keep his body intact for a million years!

And in a million years, who knew what cultures would learn to pilot vessels through s.p.a.ce and come his way to revive him? Possibly alien cultures whom his superior genius for organizing would enable him to dominate. Already, the contemplation of such a possibility rendered the prospect so alluring he wondered why he was holding back. Why not step out of the airlock immediately?

It was calm reasoning that deterred him, the realization that if his scheme for survival were to meet success, he would have to lay his plans deep enough to meet every contingent possibility.

Two things became immediately apparent as essential: (1) He would have to adopt a method of self-freezing that would a.s.sure instantaneous cessation of his life activities without injuring his body cells by converting the water to ice. (2) He would have to leave behind him an explanation of what he had done and sufficient directions concerning his revivification that he would not be restored so slowly as to alter his molecular structure, a turn of affairs which would in fact make him unalterably dead long before he approached normal body warmth.

Now, thoroughly aroused by the possibility of escaping total death, Edwin Dollard fought his way back through the damaged compartments to the tuberoom. Here were vats of liquid helium, used in Collins engines to refrigerate the volatile rocket fuel. The helium, Dollard knew, was in turn kept super-cool by contact with magnetic salts, mostly iron ammonium sulphate, the magnetic field being generated by the ship's auxiliary dynamos when in operation, the ship's batteries at other times.

But if one were to open all ports or hatches, allowing the atmosphere to escape, the absolute zero s.p.a.ce would infiltrate the ship's interior making it unnecessary for either the helium to cool the fuel, or the salts to cool the helium. All would probably approach a state of absolute heat death. And the body of a man, immersed in the helium vat, would be preserved for eternity!

Dollard laughed. He would defy Garth yet!

He spent the following day in the most efficient of preparations.

Moving about the ship, he posted complete directions for his recovery in as many languages as he knew. Then, he drew with painstaking care a series of diagrams that repeated the information in pictograph form.

Finally he recorded directions on sound tape and hooked the reproducer to an electron eye so it would commence to play the moment the vessel was entered.

This task completed, he set about to prepare his own body. It was imperative that the suspension take place so speedily that none of the animal heat was retained. For this purpose, he imbibed a heavy amount of alcohol which served to flush his capillaries and distribute calories more equally through his system.

Next, he gathered wiring and rigged up a remote-control board that would enable him to open the ship's hatches from sanctuary inside the tuberoom. When finally ready, he stood by the helium vats, opened a switch on the jerry-built board and listened to the vessel's atmospheric envelope swoosh out in the pa.s.sages just beyond the sealed tuberoom hatch.

Now, the only air remaining inside the craft was that in the tuberoom itself.

At that moment, the ship circling the mother planet entered the shadow of Terra and chilled perceptibly in the absence of radiated sunlight.

Dollard stripped to his skin. His lips were blue and his limbs were trembling, despite their cushion of fat. He pressed the last b.u.t.ton and the pressure inside the room commenced to drop. He stood by the largest vat until all the oxygen was gone, except that remaining in his lungs. The outer hatch swung open, admitting the penetrating cold of complete vacuum.

The trapped industrialist exhaled his breath, counted three and dived into the tank.

His body sank and the atoms of helium temporarily left their random state with the influx of heat, but returned quickly as the magnetic field took up the slack, vaporizing the ammonium salts. All was quiet again--

The human brain and the secondary laws of thermodynamics had combined to thwart the will of a relentless universe.