tens of thousands of light years all about. "What's this," he rumbled wrathfully as he floated without weight in darkness. "Is this what happens when a man dies? It'll be frightfully tedious." Dona now had the face-plate of her helmet open. She kissed Kim hungrily. "I—brought you something," she said unsteadily. "I'm not sure what, but—something. They've separate engines to power their generators on that ship, and there were tanks I thought were fuel-tanks." "Space!" roared the Mayor of Steadheim, forward. "Who's that talking? Am I dead? Is this hades?" "You're not dead yet," Kim called to him. "I'll tell you in a minute if you will be." There were no emergency-lights in the ship, but Dona's suit was necessarily so equipped. She turned on lights and Kim looked at the two objects she had brought. "My dear," he told her, "you did it! A little fuel-tank with gallons in it and a complete catalyzer. By the size of it, one of their beams uses an engine big enough for fifty ships like this!" Clutching at every projection, he made his way to the engine-room. Dona followed. "I'm glad, Kim," she said unsteadily, "that I was able to do something important. You always do everything." "The heck I do," he said. "But anyhow...." He worked on the tank. She'd sheared it off with a tiny atomic torch and the severed fuel-line had closed of itself, of course. He spliced it into the Starshine's fuel-line, and waited eagerly for the heavy, viscid fluid to reach the catalyzer and then the engines. "We'll—be all right now?" asked Dona hopefully. "We were on transmitter-drive for five minutes, at a guess. You know what that means!" She caught her breath. "Kim! We're lost!" "To say that we're lost is a masterpiece of understatement," he said wryly. "At transmitter-speed we could cross the First Galaxy in a ten-thousandth of a second. Which means roughly a hundred thousand light years in a ten-thousandth of a second. And we traveled for three hundred seconds or thereabouts. What are our chances of finding our way back?"
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