The face of the asteroid was cold and Jubil lay against it, held as lightly as a maiden's kiss by the ounce or so of gravity.
He was smiling as the darkness of space was suddenly brilliantly lighted. Spears of bluish flame, each with its tip of crimson, spread across the warp of time, and subconsciously Jubil found himself waiting for the shock wave. Then he laughed. In space there was no atmosphere; he would never be buffeted by the blast that had destroyed the Mercury II and the mutineer Radik.
Jubil thought again of the hellish radiation to which he had exposed himself. There was no other way. To destroy the delicate regulating linkage of the Schoenbirk-Halsted, a man must enter the combustion chamber where the pilot-piles idled. There had been just time enough for that, before Radik had sent for him.
Had there been ample oxygen, Jubil Marken knew that he would only have lived until his radiation-seared heart painfully failed to function. But, thanks to Radik, Jubil had been spared both the disintegration of the Mercury II and an agonizing death from slow radiation burn.
He was, Jubil reflected, as effective in his own way as was Schoenbirk and Kane. In the end, he was still an Academy man with them. He was peacefully smiling as he twisted tight the oxygen valve at his throat....