Yanking a pair of snippers from his tool kit, Jak trudged along the edge of the Box and cut the cables of the grapplers. He clutched the low hand rail and shoved the curvilinear side of the spacecopter. For a moment, he watched as the space between the weightless vessels widened. He dropped into the airlock.

Drusilla reclined on the astrogator's couch. She had exchanged her concealing red robe for a suit of skintight translucent cover-alls. "Back so soon, captain?" she mewed. "Did he put up a last heroic struggle, or did he devitalize like the coward he was?"

Jak said, "He didn't have to be heroic. He used his brains."

Drusilla looked up. Her face blanched even under the Deepurple she had sprayed on. "Jak!" she squeaked.

Jak hung his helmet on the rack, swept some of the broken tubes and severed wires from the control board, placed them in a jagged ball in midair, and savagely canceled the flight plan. He activated the calculator. In a voice like nothing he had heard issue from his own throat, he said, "Your Captain Flim didn't know any more about a pistol than the average citizen. At sea level on Earth, the 6 mm Morgia bullet has a muzzle velocity of 1253 meters per second; and, at a range of, say, 300 meters, the bullet rises 10.5 centimeters above the line of sight at the top of the curve it traces. Out here, with no gravity or air pressure, the bullet travels in a perfectly straight line. I ran Flim's sight all the way up, and when he tried to hit my head as I asked him, he missed me a mile-- whatever that means. On Earth, he would have hit regardless of the sights. He had only one shot, because the cold of the dark side contracted the slide; and the recoil, terrific without gravity, sent him and his crew flying."

Jak left the clicking calculator and stared at the motionless Drusilla. "Don't worry about your sweetheart," he rasped. "He'll drift back to his copter. We're changing course for the Patrol station on Callisto to report and have them picked up. I hope the centrifugal force and deceleration is enough to smear you!"

"But, Jak," Drusilla moaned, "you know--"

"Don't start that again!" Jak roared. "You told me a--a dis-truth! What an act! You ought to be in tridies. At two months, Lar BW16177 on Hungaria looked like-- You wanted to go to Earth because of that prize in the Photographic Salon! You wanted to taste your fame. What are you trying to do, ruin me? You don't need the Wollongong Obstetric Hospital any 

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