This new course, said the equations, a course which would require all the remaining fuel to maintain, would steer the ship into a permanent orbit around the earth—an ellipse with the point of apogee far beyond Luna. He now had the certainty of continued life—for a few more days, until his provisions gave out....
Again he cursed the name of Garth. But for the man's treachery he would be well on his way to Venus. Now, he was a helpless trapped mass of protoplasm, protected from his bitter airless environment only by the same steel walls of the cage that held him....
hroughout the next twenty-four hours, as the nature of the elliptical orbit he had entered became more and more apparent, Dollard fought off sleep while his frightened brain racked and racked again its scattered fund of knowledge for an answer to the new problem.
But at last, the narcosis of cellular exhaustion completely overcame him and he slept.
When he awoke, he was chilled and hungry. The ship had passed into the shadow of Luna and its bulkheads no longer conducted heat to the convecting air envelope inside from the outer plates, generally warmed by solar radiations. It took him sometime to get warm again.
He pondered anew his predicament. It would be useless to plead for help to the Terran space authorities. All interplanetary flights had been grounded since the Asiatics had scattered the epidemic over the western world only to have it re-invade their own borders; all the national governments were fighting rebellion and plague simultaneously, and most important of all as far as Dollard was concerned, he had effectively outlawed himself from the jurisdiction of all governments by his acts of murder and his treason in fleeing Terra. No, there could be no help from the officials of earth.
Not in present years anyhow, he thought. But, wait! Suppose this plague should ultimately die out or be conquered. Then, wouldn't space travel be resumed? If not by the human race, by its successor—whichever race or species, if such could happen, that mutated successfully enough to produce a plague resistant strain and then evolved a rational brain.
Civilizations rose and toppled in cycles, he knew. Sometime in the near future or even the far future, another civilization would emerge on Terra and another race would conquer the stars.