out as soon as Swenson and Isolde reached the base of the ship, and charged, waving their razor-edged blades.

Swenson started Isolde up the ladder, then turned and drew his knife-ray. He cut furiously, and "fireheads" fell like flies. But one of them managed to get through, and when Swenson finally ascended the ladder, he was minus a forearm.

Half fainting, he activated the lock, which the Idwandanans had accidentally closed and had been unable to reopen, and pulled Isolde inside. At the forest's edge Skonsdoggugil was mustering another contingent of warriors. Swenson pulled Isolde into the ship proper, secured the outer and inner locks. With her help, he got a tourniquet on the stump of his arm. Everything was swimming before his eyes by then, but he managed to gain the control room and strap Isolde and himself onto the two acceleration couches. He had one chance, and one chance only: to reach civilization before he bled to death. Hastily he calculated the co-ordinates of the nearest civilized planet, and fed them into the automatic pilot. He activated the pilot just before he blacked out.

It was his haste that was his undoing. The planet he had wanted was Delta Bootis 11, and the NRA should have snapped out of transphotic within orbiting distance in less than three objective days. On the fourth day, however, they were still in f.t.l. drive.

Swenson knew by then that he was dying. What he did not know was that Isolde was dying, too. Constant usage had depleted her batteries long before their guarantee was due to run out, and there was very little life left in them. But she showed no signs of her approaching demise, preparing his meals in the galley each day and bringing them to the control room where he still lay upon the acceleration couch. She even fed him as he grew weaker, and once he roused briefly from a long stupor to find her darning his socks.

Co-ordinates, once fed into an automatic pilot, could not be cancelled; but automatic pilots were so constructed that whenever they received non-planetary co-ordinates, they altered them to the co-ordinates of the inhabitable planet which most closely corresponded to them. The NRA, therefore, could not end up in planetless space.

As the days passed, Swenson began wondering what kind of a world they were approaching, and whether he would ever see it or not. On the sixth day, his questions were answered when the NRA emerged from transphotic in the midst of a multiple sun system, near a gray and foreboding sphere. He pretended as long as he could 

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