"He can"t stay where he is; there"s no protection up here! When that stern bulkhead goes...."
It was breaking. I could see it bending sternward under the pressure.
And at best it was leaking air, so that the decks were a rush of wind.
Already Drac and I were gasping with the lowered pressure.
"Drac, get out of here. Go get Waters; bring him forward. The h.e.l.l with his transmitter: this is life or death!"
"But you?"
"I"m coming down. From the forward deck, call the hull control rooms.
Order everybody forward and to the deck."
"What about the pressure pumps?"
"I can keep them going from here."
I set the circulating system to guide the fresh air forward, but it was futile against the sucking rush of wind toward the stern. As the pumps speeded up I saw, with the little added pressure, the great cross panel of the stern bulkhead straining harder. It would go in a moment.
Drac was clinging to me. "Tell me what to do!"
"I"ve told you what to do!" I shoved him to the catwalk. "Get out of here. Get Waters forward. Get the men out of the hull."
His anguished eyes stared at me; then he turned and ran forward on the catwalk. I saw him forcibly dragging the bald-headed Waters from the helio cubby. It was the last time I ever saw either of them.
A buzzer was ringing in the turret, and I plunged back for it. The exertion put a band of pain across my chest, a panting constriction from the lowering pressure.
Fanning, a.s.sistant engineer, was still at the pressure pumps. His voice came up: "Pumps and renewers working. Will you use the gravity shifters?"
"h.e.l.l, no! Get out of there, Fanning. We"re smashed. Air going. It"s a matter of minutes--abandoning ship. Get forward!"
Suddenly the stern bulkhead cracked with a great diagonal rift. I waited a moment to give them all time to get forward; then I slid all the cross "midship bulkheads.
It was barely in time. The stern bulkhead went out with a gale of wind, but the barrier amidships stemmed it. Half of the vessel sternward was devoid of air, but here in the bow we could last a little longer. Beneath me I could see Grantline"s men--some of them, not all--and a few of the stewards, crew and officers, crowding the deck, donning s.p.a.ce-suits. The two side chambers were ready; half a dozen men crowded into each of them. The deck doors slid closed. The outer ports opened; helmeted, goggled, bloated figures were blown by the outgoing air from the chamber into s.p.a.ce. Then the outer slides went closed. The pumps filled up the chambers; the deck doors opened again. Another batch of men....
I saw Grantline, suited but with his helmet off, dashing from one side of the deck to the other, commanding the abandonment.
The central bulkheads seemed momentarily holding. Then little red lights in the panel board before me showed where in the hull corridors the doors were leaking, cracking, giving away, breaking under the strain. The whole ribbed framework of the vessel was strained and slued. The bulkhead sides no longer set true in the cas.e.m.e.nts. Air was whining everywhere and pulling sternward.
It was the last stand; I was aware that the alarm siren had ceased.
There was a sudden stillness, with only the shouts of the remaining men at the exit-ports mingling with the whine of the wind and the roaring in my head. I felt detached, far-away; my senses were reeling.
I staggered to the gauges of the Erentz system, the system whereby an oscillating current, circling within the double-sh.e.l.led walls of hull and dome, absorbed into negative energy much of the interior pressure.
The main walls of the vessel were straining outward. The _Cometara_ could collapse at any moment. I started for the catwalk door. The electro-telescope stood near it and I yielded to a vague desire to gaze into the eyepiece. The instrument was still operative. I swept it sternward.
The enemy ship had not vanished. By what strange means, I cannot say, its velocity had been checked. A few thousand miles from us, it was making a narrow, close-angle turn. Coming back? I thought so.
I suddenly realized my intention of having all the gravity-plates in neutral before abandoning the ship. I seized the controls now. An agony of fear was upon me that the shifting valves would fail. But they did not. The plates slid haltingly, reluctantly.
I recall staggering to the catwalk. It seemed that the central bulkhead was breaking. There were fallen figures on the deck beneath me. I stumbled against the body of a man who had tangled himself in the stays of the ladder rail and was hanging there.
I think I fell the last ten feet to the deck. The roaring in my ears, the bands tightening about my chest encompa.s.sed all the world.
Then I was on my feet again, and I stumbled over another body. It was garbed in a s.p.a.ce-suit, with the helmet beside it. I stripped it of the suit. I was panting, with all the world whirling in a daze, bursting spots of light before my eyes.
Ten feet away down the deck was the opened door of the pressure chamber. A bloated figure came into my dreamlike vista, moving for the pressure door. It turned, saw me, came leaping and bent over me. I saw behind the vizor that it was Grantline. His bloated, gloved hands helped me don my suit.
He helped me with my helmet. The metal tip on Grantline"s gloved hand touched the contact-plate on my shoulder. His voice sounded from the tiny audiphone grid within my helmet. "Gregg! Thank G.o.d I found you!
All right?"
"Yes." My head was clearing.
"I"ve got the chamber ready. We"re the last, Gregg."
I gripped his shoulder. "You"re sure there"s n.o.body else?"
"No. I"ve been everywhere I could reach. The central bulkheads are almost gone."
He pushed me into the pressure chamber. There was hardly need to close the door after us. I stood gripping him as he opened the small outer slides. The abyss was at our feet; the outgoing wind tore at us like a gale, so that we stood gripping the cas.e.m.e.nts.
"Thank G.o.d you"ve got a power-suit, Gregg. So have I. We must keep together."
"Yes."
I could feel the floor grid of the chamber shuddering beneath my feet.
The _Cometara_ was cracking, bursting outward throughout her length; at any instant she might collapse.
For a moment we stood poised. Beneath us, here at the brink were millions upon millions of miles of emptiness, the remote, unfathomable void. Blazing worlds down there in the black darkness.
"Good-by, Gregg. It may be the end for us."
"Good luck, Johnny."
His bloated figure dropped away from me. I waited just an instant, and then I dove into s.p.a.ce.
For a moment there was a chaos of strangeness, the wrench to my sense of the transition. I had been the inhabitant of a little world, the _Cometara_, with a gravity beneath my feet. Now, in a breath, I had no world to inhabit. I was alone in s.p.a.ce. No gravity; nothing solid to touch; emptiness.
I was in a world to myself, and the abnormality of it brought a mental shock. But in a moment the adjustment came. I pa.s.sed the transition, the sense of falling.
The firmament steadied and my senses cleared. My dive from the _Cometara_ carried me in a slow arc some three hundred feet away.
There had been a sense of falling, but no actual fall. My velocity was r.e.t.a.r.ded, with the ma.s.s of the _Cometara_ pulling at me. I went like a toy boat in water shoved by a child, quickly slowing. In a few moments, the velocity was gone, and I hung poised. I saw Grantline"s bloated form not over fifty feet from me. He waved an arm at me.
Out here in the void I lay weightless, as though upon an infinitely soft feather bed. I could kick, flounder, but not endow myself with motion. I craned my neck, gazed around through the bulging vizor pane.
The Earth and the Sun hung level with the white star-dots strewn everywhere. I could not see that unknown light-beam from Greater New York; it was shafting out now in the other direction, so that the Earth hid it from me. Venus was visible to one side of the Sun. The enemy light-stream from Grebhar was apparent; and as I turned my body and bent double to look behind me, I saw Mars and the sword-like ray from Ferrok-Shahn. The beams streamed off like the radiance of the Milky Way, faintly luminous but seemingly visible for an infinite distance.
The _Cometara_ was obviously falling now toward the Moon, drawn irresistibly, and all of us with her, toward the lunar surface. It seemed so close, that black and white mountainous disc. We were, I suppose, some twenty thousand miles from it, gathering speed as it pulled at us. But that motion was not apparent now. Distance dwindled all these celestial motions, so that all the firmament seemed frozen into immobility.
But there was some motion. Twenty or more bloated figures, the survivors from the wreck of the _Cometara_, were encircling it in varying orbits, revolving around it like tiny satellites. Some were closing in, drawn against it. I saw one plunge against the wrecked dome, and begin crawling like a fly. And I found that the forces of the firmament were molding my orbit also. My outward plunge was checked. I poised for an indeterminate instant, and then I took my orbit. I too, was a satellite of the _Cometara_.