Don't look at the bulkheads. Mold blankets them now. I can almost see it spreading, sporulating, filling the air with its dry, stale smell. Jesus! There's a patch of it on Chief Bath's shirt. I'm coughing almost continuously. The spores irritate my throat. Thank heaven they don't give me an allergic reaction.

The last of our juice is gone. We're down to water and bouillon and pills. Yo-ho-ho. Famine in the Climbers.

Where's that fearless old spacedog who jollied the boys on the beacon? Ho! The life-takers have whisked away his disguise.

Vossbrink came round an hour ago. He bypassed me again. I cursed him mercilessly. He gave me a tablet I'm to swallow only on the Old Man's orders.

Those of us still conscious are a little insane. I want out, but... I don't have enough residual defiance to take the tablet. Been thinking about it, but can't get my hand to my mouth.

Christ, it's gloomy in here!

Maintaining a tenuous touch with reality by hating the Old Man. My old friend. My old classmate.

Doing this to me. I could cut his throat and smile.

And those bastards out there. Why the hell don't they go away? Enough is enough.

Westhause and the Commander are the only watchstanders left in Ops. I can't hear anything from Engineering, but somebody is holding out. Only Bradley is active in Ship's Services. The Ensign is stubborn. Here in Weapons I have two open-eyed companions, Kuyrath and Piniaz.

Kuyrath suddenly throws himself toward the Ops hatch. Muttering, he tries to claw his way through.

What the hell?

Aha. Another reason for the sedations. This could be contagious. The madness howls along the frontiers of my mind. I force myself to rise, to stalk Kuyrath with a hypo Vossbrink left for this contingency.

Kuyrath sees me coming. He leaps at me. His eyes are wild, his teeth bare. I punch the hypo into his stomach, yank its trigger.

For a dozen seconds I shield my testicles and eyes, writhe away from champing teeth, evade clawing fingers, and wonder what went wrong. Why doesn't he fold?

He collapses.

"What's going on back there?"

I stagger to a comm, mumble. Somehow, the Commander understands. I stare at Piniaz. Why didn't he help me?

His eyes are open but he isn't seeing anything. He's out. The bastard. What the hell did he do?

"All right." The Commander sounds like he's talking from the next galaxy. 'Take Alewel's board."

"Huh?" I'm getting foggy. Want to give up. The exertion drained me. I can't get the drift.

"Take over on Alewel's board. I've got to have somebody on Missiles. Where's Piniaz?"

"On Missiles. Somebody on Missiles." I stagger to Alewel's seat. The Missileman is curled on the deck grates. His breathing is strained and ragged. He's in bad trouble. 'Tired. Going to take capsule now. Sleep."

"No. No. Come on. Hang in there. We're almost home. All you have to do is activate the missile board."

"Activate missile board." My fingers act of their own accord. My hands look like thin brown spiders as they dance over the slimy, mold-green board, caressing a wakening galaxy of key-lights.

I giggle incessantly.

"Where's Piniaz?"

This time the message gets through. "Sleeping. Gone to sleep." Alewel is making a thin, whining sound.

"Damn. Be ready to launch when we go norm."

"Ready... Launch missiles." One spider starts dancing the arming sequence. The other explores the mysteries of the safeties.

"Negative. Negative. Get your hands away from that board. Waldo, I'm going to have to go back there."

A semblance of reason returns. I draw my hands back slowly, stare at them. Finally, I say,

"Missiles prepared for launch. Launch Control standing by."

"Good. Good. I knew I could count on you. It'll be a while yet. Just hang on."

Hang on. Hang on. Only five men conscious in the whole damned ship and one of them is hollering hang on. Till when?

Till the Commander and I are the only ones left? Suppose the party is still going on when we go down? It won't matter to the others, but what am I supposed to do? Bend over and kiss my ass goodbye?

Alewel has stopped making noises. He's even stopped breathing. Mostly I feel puzzled when I look at him.

I don't think he's the only one. It's that bad in here.

I drive myself back into rituals of hatred and anger, thinking up tortures to inflict on the Old Man. Curses and threats rip themselves from my throat in an evil imitation of a Gregorian chant.

It passes the time. It keeps me going.

Skulking on the borderlands of lunacy, I find myself victimized by one of time's relativistic pranks. Before it seems possible, another two hours have fled.

"Hey down there. Stand by. Going down in five." West-hause. He sounds choky.

I glance at the time. A new endurance record, no doubt about it. Hurray.

"Uhn." The Commander. "Damn it, Waldo. Not now. Wake up. We're almost there. Shit." He sounds as if speech is pure torment.

Reluctance to leave the ghost world inundates me. Even hell gives one a sense of security, I suppose.

What happens if the whole crew passes out before a Climber goes down? I guess she'd keep heating till her superconductors failed, her magnetics went, and she destroyed herself in a sudden annihilation.

Why do I feel less uncomfortable now than I did two hours ago? Internal temperature is higher than ever before. Literally, we're cooking.

Haltingly, the Commander says, "All I want is for you to be faster on the trigger than anybody waiting for us. Quick enough to keep them from getting out an instel."

"I'll try."

"Ten seconds. Nine... Eight..."

It's a savage plunge to zero Bev. The concretization of my surroundings stuns my conscious mind.

The frightened old tree ape in the back of my mind is on survival watch. I finish the launch sequence'before the venting machinery begins humming. In fact, I start before the ship is all the way down, and launch before any instrument has anything to say about targets.

The way Tannian fusses about wasting missiles, this could earn me a Board of Inquiry...

Except there is a target. The Old Man and Mr. Westhause made an astute guess.

We break cover less than ten thousand kilometers from the bones of the murdered moon. Fate does us a favor. She puts the watcher in the gap, not a hundred kilometers from our drop point. I can see her on gun camera. So. They thought we were gone, but left somebody just in case. They always do.

"About damned time it went our way," I mutter.

The missile is on its way. The Fire Control system barely has time to lock it on target.

The Commander holds norm for just four seconds. Hardly long enough to make a microdegree's difference in internal temperature. We run.

The missile, accelerating at one hundred gravities, strikes home before the gentlemen of the other firm get their thumbs out of their ears.

In essence, a classic Climber strike. With a lot of luck thrown in.

The Commander goes down again five light-seconds away. He vents heat and watches.

The destroyer dies. And neither the radio nor tachyon detectors react with anything but blast noise. No messages out. The Commander played the right card. He outwaited the hunt. The Executioner has gone looking elsewhere.

The glare of the fireball fades. I check the temperature. It's falling slowly. Maybe a degree a minute. The minutes tramp away on the feet of snails.

The destroyer got no message out, but that treacherous probe remains.

The first hunter hypers in an hour later.

A dozen men have recovered sufficiently to resume work.

Several more are gone forever.... The Commander commences a new ploy. He calls me, says, "Program the Eleven bird for maximum straight-line hyper fly." Piniaz hasn't recovered. For the moment I'm in charge.