that he had never left home.

The sudden crackling of the almost static-jammed ultra-wave radio snapped through to his mind. Quickly he began to free himself from the bunk.

"MR4, come in, MR4."

An eternity seemed to pass as he floated across the room, deliberately disregarding the strategically-placed hand-grips on the walls, floor, and ceiling. It seemed aeons before he reached the narrow little control compartment, and got the ultra-wave radio into action, nearly wrecking it in his clumsy-fingered haste.

"MR4 to Earth. Over."

He waited a few moments and then repeated the message as no acknowledgment came through. Then he abruptly remembered the nearby presence of the Sun and its interference with radio transmission and reception. He was white and shaken by the time his message was received and his report requested and given.

He gave the whole tragic picture in frantic short wave. The amount of atomic fuel left in the ship, the internal and external temperatures, the distance from the Sun, and the strength of the solar disk's magnetic field and his rate of drift toward it—along with a staggering list of other pertinent factors.

At last it was over and he stood by awaiting the decision from Earth headquarters.

It came at last.

"MR4." The growling voice was Donnelly's, the huge space-engineer in charge of the smaller mail-rocket units. "You're in a tough spot but we've got an expert here from the Government. He's worked on deals like this with me before and he's got an idea.

"Here's the substance of it. We're going to send out a space tug from Mercury to see if we can haul you in. It's a new, experimental tug and it's been kept under wraps until now. But it's been designed for jobs like this and we figure it can sure as hell do it.

"There's just one hitch, though, kid. It's a mighty powerful ship so there's going to be a terrific shock when it contacts you and the magnetic grapples set to work. In your medicine kit you'll find a small hypo in a red-sealed plastic box. Take the shot that's in it immediately and we'll have the tug out there as soon as we can. It will probably take about twelve hours."

Donnelly's voice broke and he hesitated strangely for a moment. "You'll be out fast," he went on. "So you won't feel a thing when the shock wave hits you. There's less chance of injuries, this way."

"It's a lousy thing to do," cried Donnelly as he snapped off the set. "A rotten, heartless way of giving the lad false hopes. But then you don't give a damn about anybody's feelings but your own, do you, Doc?"

"Take it easy, Joe—"

"Shut up, Williams. I'm talking to this little Government time-server over here, not to you."

The psychiatrist shrugged wearily. "I don't care what you think. I've worked with you both on cases similar to this before, though I'll admit that none of them were quite as hopeless. In any case, I'll do it my way, or not at all."

"Maybe you will, maybe you will," said Donnelly. "But if I had to wait thirty days in that thing and somebody told me it was only a matter of hours—"

"I know what I'm doing even if you think that I don't. The Government has developed a set approach in matters like this. Fortunately, there aren't many of them. Perhaps if there were—"

"Let me take over, Doc," broke in Donnelly. "I'm a space-engineer and that makes me far better qualified to handle this than you are. Why the hell they ever put a psychiatrist on this job in the first place is something I'll never know, if I live to be a hundred and ten. It's a job for an engineer, not a brain washer."

"There's a lot of things you'll never know, Donnelly," the gaunt, thin little man sighed wearily. He sat down at the long mahogany table in the Radio Room. With a careless wave of one arm, he swept a pile of papers and magazines to the floor.

"Try and get this through your head, Donnelly. There's not too much you can do by yourself for that boy up there. You just don't know how to cope