whizzing along there back of him, he’d have had every right to shoot you down in cold blood. Life is hard, Joseph, life is merciless....”

Right then I felt a tickle in my throat.

I tried quick to shut off the radio, but it is remarkably difficult to tongue anything when you have a cough coming. It came out finally in a series of squeaky glubs.

“Snap to, Joseph, and listen hard,” I heard Jeff say. “It’s started again. Animal noises this time. You know if they make spacesuits for black panthers, Joseph?”

I tongued off the radio quick, before the follow-up cough came.

I didn’t have anything left to do now but think. So I thought about Jeff—how there seemed to be one Jeff who hated my guts and another Jeff who idolized me and another Jeff sneaking around in a jungle of sabertooth tigers and ... heck, there was probably a good twenty Jeffs sitting around inside his skull, some in light, some in darkness, but all of them watching each other and arguing together all the time. It was an odd way to think of a personality—a sort of perpetual Kaffeeklatsch—but it had its points. Maybe some of the little guys weren’t Jeffs at all, but his father and mother and a caveman ancestor or two and maybe some great-great-grandchild butting in now and then from the future....

Well, I saw that speculation was getting out of hand so, taking a tip from Jeff, I began to count my own sins.

It took quite a while. Some of them were pretty interesting reading, almost enough to take my mind off my predicament, but I tired of it finally.

Then I began to count the stars.

It was really the longest two hours plus I ever spent, except maybe the time my first big girl disappeared. But I don’t know. The experiences are hard to compare.

I was about halfway through the stars when I went weightless. For an awful instant I thought the line had parted at last, but then I looked toward the ship and saw the bright little moon was gone.

Right away I gave a couple of tugs on the line and began to close slowly with the tail. No trouble at all—actually my only difficulty was resisting the temptation to build up more momentum, which would have resulted in a crash landing.

I softed-in on Trompled Love okay, except there was a 

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