Well, it must have been a blue moon. We were hit.
It was just after reveille, “A” deck time, and I was standing by my bunk, making it up. I had my Scout uniform in my hands and was about to fold it up and put it under my pillow. I still didn’t wear it. None of the others had uniforms to wear to Scout meetings so I didn’t wear mine. But I still kept it tucked away in my bunk.
Suddenly I heard the goldarnest noise I ever heard in my life. It sounded like a rifle going off right by my ear, it sounded like a steel door being slammed, and it sounded like a giant tearing yards and yards of cloth, all at once.
Then I couldn’t hear anything but a ringing in my ears and I was dazed. I shook my head and looked down and I was staring at a raw hole in the ship, almost between my feet and nearly as big as my fist.
There was scorched insulation around it and in the middle of the hole I could see blackness—then a star whipped past and I realized that I was staring right out into space.
There was a hissing noise.
I don’t remember thinking at all. I just wadded up my uniform, squatted down, and stuffed it in the hole. For a moment it seemed as if the suction would pull it on through the hole, then it jammed and stuck and didn’t go any further. But we were still losing air. I think that was the point at which I first realized that we were losing air and that we might be suffocated in vacuum.
There was somebody yelling and screaming behind me that he was killed and alarm bells were going off all over the place. You couldn’t hear yourself think. The air-tight door to our bunk room slid across automatically and settled into its gaskets and we were locked in.
That scared me to death.
I know it has to be done. I know that it is better to seal off one compartment and kill the people who are in it than to let a whole ship die—but, you see, I was in that compartment, personally. I guess I’m just not the hero type.
I could feel the pressure sucking away at the plug my uniform made. With one part of my mind I was recalling that it had been advertised as “tropical weave, self ventilating” and wishing that it had been a solid plastic rain coat instead. I was afraid to stuff it in any harder, for fear it would go all the way through and leave us sitting there, chewing vacuum. I would have passed up desserts for the next ten years for just one rubber patch, the size of my hand.
The screaming had stopped; now it started up again. It was Noisy Edwards, beating on the air-tight door and yelling, “Let me out of here! Get me out of here!”
On top of that I could hear Captain Harkness’s voice coming through the bull horn. He was saying,
“H-twelve! Report! H-twelve! Can you hear me?”
On top of that everybody was talking at once.
I yelled: “Quiet!” at the top of my voice—and for a second or so there was quiet.
Peewee Brunn, one of my Cubs, was standing in front of me, looking big-eyed. “What happened, Billy?” he said.
I said, “Grab me a pillow off one of the bunks. Jump!”
He gulped and did it. I said, “Peel off the cover, quick!”
He did, making quite a mess of it, and handed it to me—but I didn’t have a hand free. I said, “Put it down on top of my hands.”
It was the ordinary sort of pillow, soft foam rubber. I snatched one hand out and then the other, and then I was kneeling on it and pressing down with the heels of my hands. It dimpled a little in the middle and I was scared we were going to have a blowout right through the pillow. But it held. Noisy was screaming again and Captain Harkness was still asking for somebody, anybody, in compartment H-12 to tell him what was going on. I yelled “Quiet!” again, and added, “Somebody slug Noisy and shut him up.”