would soon support the pressure-sensitive mat I was going to stick to some of her solar generators. When the 'couple said Telstar had reached zero centigrade, I pulled the mat loose from where it was stuck to my left leg and plastered it above the gate I was going to open. I say above, because it was closer to one pole—the "North" pole of the satellite—than the gate.

It was time to go to work on my first screw. And there I got my next lesson. It was a real big screw, as they go, a 4-40 flat head machine screw with a length of about three-quarters of an inch. I would have to give it thirty turns to back it out. I never gave it the first turn. The head snapped off as soon as I applied a few inch-pounds of torque.

Yes, the surface had heated up nicely, but the shank of the screw was about two hundred below zero centigrade, and far brittler than glass.

I cussed some and reported to Sid what had happened.

"Have to drill it out," I said.

My drill was a cutie. It was a modified dentists' drill, the kind that's run by a little air turbine at about two hundred thousand r.p.m.'s. I really mean that. They turn like mad.

I'd been taught to use it with care. When a dentist drills your teeth, he blows olive oil and water through the turbine, and the mixture cools the tooth—and the drill—while the cutting is going on. We couldn't afford any cloud of vapor—or the shorting out that ice would cause—so I had only the pressurized mixture of oxygen and helium in the tanks on my back to run the drill. And that meant light and intermittent pressures on the number 43 wire gauge drill—the one that's the right size to drill out a 4-40. It took me about fifteen minutes and I was down to my last number 43 drill bit when she broke free.

From then on I had to heat each screw before I went to work on it. I had something like a soldering iron that I could press against the screw-head. Heat would flow through the highly conductive alloy and make it less brittle. I flicked each screw I removed out into space and at last carefully hinged the gate wide open.

The gate was the length of the sector—about two feet. It was four inches wide and about an inch thick and had parts strung along it like kernels on an ear of corn.

At this stage I readjusted the position of my webbing girdle until I could clamp my head in position and begin the testing. It was slow work. The first sad thing was to learn that the solenoid M1537 was as good as new. When I put enough voltage across its terminals, the actuator clicked down through the core.

I swore a blue streak.

"What is it Mike?" Sid's voice came in my ear.

"Trouble," I said. "What did we expect?"

"Roger," he said in that toneless unexcited astronauts' voice. "Return to ship, Mike."

"Not now," I said. "I've just got the oyster opened."

His voice cut like my drill-bit. "I ordered you to return to ship. Your air supply is about shot."

"I haven't been out that long," I protested, not feeling too sure about the lapse of time.

"Your drill chewed it up pretty fast. Quit talking and start moving."

I was thankful for the experience of moving in close to the bird. The same tricks worked much more smoothly as I used my deflection plate in front of my belly blast to turn me to face the floodlight, and then followed up with a light shove or two in the spine to start me drifting toward Nelly Bly. There didn't seem any rush, and I drifted slowly over, using only a couple triggered bursts of deceleration to slow me down as I approached the open hatch.

Inside we went through the drill. My ears popped a little as Sid unchucked my spent tanks, and popped again as the new ones came on with a hiss.

"Take it easy on that steering fuel, Mike," he said again. "You're getting awfully low."

"Sure," I said and let myself drift out the hatch. I had enough sense to twist so that my back jet wouldn't hit the ship. Then I took a zig-zag course through the darkness to my bird, got oriented at the open gate and went back to work. Before I could get started, my earphones spoke.

"Mike, Cleary here."

"Roger, Paul. What is it?"

"Have you gotten to that solenoid yet?"

"Yes."

"What can you tell me?"

"That you're a fathead. Now shut up. I'm busy."

"Roger, Mike," Paul Cleary acknowledged quite meekly.

So I started again, reaching with my leads from point to point. After a certain number of tests, I had the area isolated, but not the part. From here on it would have to be disassembly. Every tiny screw had to be heated, then teased out with a jeweler's screwdriver. Some took my patented ratchet extension. The big miracle was that I didn't break anything.