The Stardust's mechanical voice bellowed: "Engine room!" It reproduced the captain's heavy breathing and his tired voice. "We're about midway to Venus," it said. "There were two ships and we drove them off. But there may be others. They'll be coming back. They know we've been hit. We have to get away fast!"

Shano could see the captain in his mind, worried, squared face slick with moisture. Shouting into a control room mike. Trying to find out what the matter was with his space ship.

The engineer's answer came from the grill. "Impossible, sir. Engine room full of toxia gas. Not a suit aboard prepared to withstand it. And we have to keep it in there. Selector filaments won't function without the gas. Our only chance was to put a man in the engine room to repair the broken selector valve rods or keep them running by hand."

"Blast it!" roared the captain. "No way of getting in there? Can't you by-pass the selector?"

"No. It's the heart of the new cosmic drive, sir. The fuels must pass through selector valves before entering the tube chambers. Filaments will operate so long as toxia gas is there to burn, and will keep trying to open the valves and compensate for fluctuating engine temperature. But the rod pins have melted down, sir—they're common tungsten steel—and when the rods pull a valve open, they slip off and drop down, useless. It's a mess. If we could only get a man in there he might lift up the dropped end of a rod and slip it into place each time it fell, and keep the valves working and feeding fuel."

The speaker spluttered and Shano smoked thoughtfully, listening to the talk back and forth, between the captain and the engineer. He didn't understand it, but knew that everything was ended. They were broken down in space and would never make Earth. Those Uranian devils would come streaking back. Catch them floating, helpless, and blast them to bits. And he would never get home to die.

Shano coughed, and cursed his lungs. Time was when these gum-clogged lungs had saved his life. In the Plutonian mines. Gas explosions in the tunnels. Toxia gas, seeping in, burning the men's insides. But with gum-clogged lungs he'd been able to work himself clear. Just getting sick where other men had died, their insides burned out.

Shano smoked and thought.

They wouldn't even know, he told himself, squirming through the emergency exit into the engine room, and sealing it 

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