He wondered how many hours he would have to wait before help would come. But that didn't matter. He would be asleep, anyway.
The temperature had climbed. It was burning, roaring hot.
Gently he slid the needle into his arm and depressed the plunger....
The MR4 continued to spin even more lazily in space. Her sun-blackened hull, pitted by the glancing blows of by-passing meteor fragments, was slowly overheating. Her refrigeration units were gradually breaking down under their tremendous overload.
She was inching in ever-shortening circles always in the direction of the massive, molten globe not so far below....
Sometime later, Hal Burnett awakened slowly, as if from some distant and dimly-remembered dream. The haze of a deep and foggy sleep clung to the unfamiliar mass that was his mind.
A distant alarm bell had rung deep within the primitive, subcortical levels of his brain. It had rung—but not loudly nor insistently enough. It had failed to cut through the eddying fog that was rising slowly into his ebbing consciousness.
He did not remember undoing the straps with benumbed and aching fingers. He did not remember the befogged and stumbling "walk" into the Control Room. Dimly, as if viewing himself and the room from a distant world, he switched on the dying hum of the radio and tried futilely to transmit a message.
The faint crackle of the radio grew more distant. He slumped forward in the bucket seat, his head striking the controls in front of him—and, for him, the sounds of the muted radio died out completely.