It didn't seem likely. If I could reach the control panel nine-tenths of the battle would be won. Nearer to it I inched, and nearer.
The frog stirred just as my hand touched the rocket control. I swung down on it hard. Something in my brain started babbling as I swung my other hand toward the atomotor emergency bulb and splintered it with my naked palm.
The whole ship seemed to explode, carrying the top of my skull with it. I was no longer in a Mercury run spaceship screaming defiance at a frog.
I was far out in space between massive gaseous suns, red and blue and mottled, with island universes to right and left of me and a long-tailed comet sweeping down from a ragged hole on the sky.
When I crawled through the fence into my own backyard again I was bruised and partly numb, but the ship was plowing steadily through the void, and Mercury was so far away from it that it was a mere fly-speck mottling on the dull-corona-encircled disk of the sun.
The frog? Yes, it was still with us, but all the cockiness had gone out of it. It came to me, as meek as a lamb, and laid all its cards on the table.
It would be the specimen now. So long as we didn't cast it out through the air-locks to freeze in the void it would consent to be exhibited in every museum on Earth. Only the museums would have to be roofless, because it would need the sunlight.
It promised not to diminish the mass of a single human being on Earth. All it needed was our sunlight. Locked up in the Lyra and freezing to death it had been compelled to tap the nearest energy source, which happened to be us.
But on Earth it would tap the sunlight. It pointed out that the sunlight falling on one square foot of Earth would keep one of our big power plants running for a year, if we knew as much as the Mercurians did about radiant heat.
"I'll be no trouble at all, Rawley. And if you wish, I'll show you how to convert sunlight into useful energy. You won't need so many cyclotrons then. Before I'd monkey with anything as unpredictable as a skinless atom I'd go jump in a lake."