"Rot!" snapped Kraag. "It's a gun. All I have to do is get the hang of aiming it properly."

"I wouldn't use too much power tonight, either," warned Jonner. "You don't get much with the solar mirror this far out. Anyhow, I took the mirror off while you were having your nap. The batteries should give out in a few hours."

Without answering, Kraag switched off his radio and removed his helmet. That last bit of information was a blow. Gradually, Jonner was stripping Kraag down to his own subsistence level.

Power or not, Kraag was determined to have his coffee. But first he went over the sphere again and switched off all unnecessary lights.

Jonner was a man who kept his word, but Kraag couldn't afford to trust him. Jonner might change his mind and try to break open the sphere again before morning. Kraag kept his spacesuit on. He did not sleep too well, for about once every 30 or 40 minutes something—either a large rock or Jonner's sledge hammer—would strike the sphere a resounding blow.

When Kraag's watch told him it was morning, he opened the ports of the center deck and let the weak sunlight stream into the sphere. Off to the east, he saw Jonner digging with a pick from the cargo. Jonner was far enough away for his legs from the knees down to be hidden by the extreme curvature of the little planet.

Kraag's first impulse was to go out and take a pot shot at him. Instead, he switched on the short-wave cooker and prepared some breakfast. Taking it up to the control room, where he could switch on the communications system, he opened the eastern port and watched Jonner. This high, he could see Jonner's feet and the hole he was digging—and Stein's body.

Jonner had taken Stein's body from the spot outside the sphere where Kraag had pushed it. He was burying Stein.

Jonner finished his excavation and laid Stein gently to rest in it. He pushed rocks back in to fill it up, and wrested a boulder that would have weighed a ton over it for a monument. Then he murmured a brief prayer over the grave.

Kraag was ashamed and then, unaccountably, angry. But he stood at the port, drinking his coffee and watching Jonner, and said nothing.

Either with chalk or with some soft rock he had found—Kraag could not tell which—Jonner wrote something on the big stone that was Stein's monument. Then he stood up and 

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