I stood clinging. This dizzying whirl! From the audiphone grid Coniston"s voice sounded.
"I say, Haljan, something"s wrong! Hahn doesn"t signal."
The look-out in the forward tower was clinging to his window. On the deck below our turret a member of the crew appeared, stood lurching for a moment, then shouted, and turned and ran, swaying, aimless. From the lower hull-corridors our grids sounded with the tramping of running steps. Panic among the crew was spreading over the ship. A chaos below decks.
I pulled at the emergency switch again. Dead....
But down below there was the manual controls.
"Snap, we must get down. The signals."
"Yes."
Coniston"s voice came like a scream from the grid. "Hahn is dead--the controls are broken! Hahn is dead!"
We barely heard him. I shouted, "Miko--hold Anita! Come on, Snap!"
We clung to the ladders. Snap was behind me. "Careful, Gregg! Good G.o.d!"
This dizzying whirl. I tried not to look. The deck under me was now a blurred kaleidoscope of swinging patches of moonlight and shadow.
We reached the deck. Ran, swaying, lurching.
It seemed that from the turret Anita"s voice followed us. "Be careful!"
Within the ship our senses steadied. With the rotating, reeling, heavens shut out, there were only the shouts and tramping steps of the panic-stricken crew to mark that anything was amiss. That, and a pseudo-sensation of lurching caused by the pulsing of gravity--a pull when the Moon was beneath our hull to combine its force with our magnetizers; a lightening when it was overhead. A throbbing, pendulum lurch--that was all.
We ran down to the corridor incline. A white-faced member of the crew, came running up.
"What"s happened? Haljan, what"s happened?"
"We"re falling!" I gripped him. "Get below. Come on with us!"
But he jerked away from me. "Falling?"
A steward came running. "Falling? My G.o.d!"
Snap swung at them. "Get ahead of us! The manual controls--our only chance--we need all you men at the compressor pumps!"
But it was an instinct to try and get on deck, as though here below we were rats caught in a trap. The men tore away from me and ran. Their shouts of panic resounded through the dim, blue-lit corridors.
Coniston came lurching from the control room. "I say--falling! Haljan, my G.o.d, look at him!"
Hahn was sprawled at the gravity-plate switchboard. Sprawled, head-down. Dead. Killed by something? Or a suicide?
I bent over him. His hands gripped the main switch. He had ripped it loose. And his left hand had reached and broken the fragile line of tubes that intensified the current of the pneumatic plate-shifters. A suicide? With his last frenzy determined to kill us all?
Then I saw that Hahn had been killed! Not a suicide! In his hand he gripped a small segment of black fabric, a piece torn from an invisible cloak? Was it?
The questions were swept away by the necessity for action. Snap was rigging the hand-compressors. If he could get the pressure back in the tanks....
I swung on Coniston. "You armed?"
"Yes." He was white-faced and confused, but not in a panic. He showed me his heat-ray cylinder. "What do you want me to do?"
"Round up the crew. Get all you can. Bring them here to man these pumps."
He dashed away. Snap shouted after him. "Kill them down if they argue!"
Miko"s voice sounded from the turret call grid: "Falling! Haljan, you can see it now! Check us!"
I did not answer that. I pumped with Snap.
Desperate moments. Or was it an hour? Coniston brought the men. He stood over them with menacing weapon.
We had all the pumps going. The pressure rose a little in the tanks.
Enough to shift a bow-plate. I tried it. The plate slowly clicked into a new combination. A gravity repulsion just in the bow-tip.
I signaled Miko. "Have we stopped swinging?"
"No. But slower."
I could feel it, that lurch of the gravity. But not steady now. A limp.
The tendency of our bow was to stay up.
"More pressure, Snap."
"Yes."
One of the crew rebelled, tried to bolt from the room. "G.o.d, we"ll crash, caught in here!"
Coniston shot him down.
I shifted another bow-plate. Then two in the stern. The stern-plates seemed to move more readily than the others.
"Run all the stern-plates," Snap advised.
I tried it. The lurching stopped. Miko called. "We"re bow down.
Falling!"
But not falling free. The Moon-gravity pull upon us was more than half neutralized.