door and led her into a tiny compartment so low that they could not stand upright—a
mere cubicle of steel. Carefully closing the door, he fingered dials upon each of the
walls of the cell, then folded himself up into a comfortable position, instructed Nadia to
do the same, and snapped off the light.
“Please leave it on,” the shaken girl asked. “It’s so ghastly!”
“We’d better save it, Nadia,” he advised, pressing her arm reassuringly. “It’s the
only light we’ve got, and we may need it worse later on—its life is limited, you know.”
“Later on? Do you think we’ll need anything— later on?”
“Sure! Snap out of it, ace! Of course they may get us, but this little tertiary air-
break is a mighty small target for them to hit. And if they miss us, as I think they will,
there’s a larger room opening off each wall of this one—at least one of which will
certainly be left intact. From any one of those rooms we can reach a life-boat. Of
course, it’s a little too much to expect that any one of the lifeboats will be left whole, but
they’re bulkheaded, too, you know, so that we can be sure of finding something able to
navigate—providing we can make our get-away. I’m mighty glad we’re aboard the old
Arcturus right now, with all her safety-devices, instead of on one of the modern liners.
We’d be sunk right.”
“I felt sunk enough for a minute—I’m feeling better now, though, since you are
taking it so calmly.”
“Sure—why not? A guy’s not dead until his heart stops beating, you know—our
turn’ll come next, when they let up a little.”
“But suppose they change the width of their slices, and hit this cubby, small as it
is?”
“It’d be just too bad,” he shrugged. “In that case, we’d never know what hit us, so
it’s no good worrying about it. But say, we might do something at that, if they didn’t hit
us square. I can move fairly fast, and might be able to get a door open before the loss of
pressure seals it. We’ll light the flash . . . here, you hold it, so that I can have both hands
free. Put both arms around me, just under the arms, and stick to me like a porous
plaster, because if I have to move at all I’ll have to jump like chain lightning. Shine the
beam right over there, so it’ll reflect and light up all the dials at once. There . . . hold on
tight! Here they come!”
As he spoke, a jarring shudder shook one side of their hiding-place, then, a
moment later, the phenomenon was repeated, but with much less force, upon the other
side. Stevens sighed with relief, took the light, and extinguished it.
“Missed us clean!” he exulted. “Now, if they don’t find us, we’re all set.”
“How can they possibly find us? I seem to be always worried about the wrong
things, but I should think that their finding us would be the least of our troubles.”
“Don’t judge their vision system by ours—they’ve got everything, apparently.
However, their apparatus may not be delicate enough to spot us in a space this small
when their projectors flash through it, as they probably will. Then, too, there’s a couple
of other big items in our favor— nobody else is in the entire lower half, since all this
machinery down here is either automatic or else controlled from up above, so they won’t
be expecting to see anybody when they get down this far; and we aren’t at all
conspicuous.
We’re both dressed in gray—your clothes in particular are almost exactly the
color of this armor-plate—so altogether we stand a good chance of being missed.”
“What shall we do now?”
“Nothing whatever—wish we could sleep for a couple of hours, but of course
there’s no hope of that. Stretch out here, like that—you can’t rest folded up like an
accordion— and I’ll lie down diagonally across the room. There’s just room for me that
way. That’s one advantage of weightlessness—you can lie down standing on your head,
and go to sleep and like it. But I forgot—you’ve never been weightless before, have you
? Does that continuous-fall sensation make you sick?”
“Not so much, now, except that I feel awfully weird inside. I was horribly dizzy
and nauseated at first, but it’s going away.”
“That’s good—it makes lots of people pretty sick. In fact, some folks get awfully
sick and can’t seem to get used to it at all. It’s the canals in the inner ear that do most of
it, you know. However, if you’re as well as that already, you’ll be a regular spacehound
in half an hour. I’ve been weightless for weeks at a stretch, out in the Sirius, and now
I’ve got so I really like it. Here, we’d better keep in touch.” He found her hand and
tucked it under his arm. “Stabilize our positions more, besides keeping us from getting
too lonesome, here in the dark,” he concluded, in a matter-of-fact voice.
“Thanks for saying ‘us’ — but you would, wouldn’t you?” and a wave of
admiration went through her for the real and chivalrous manhood of the man with whom
she had been forced by circumstances to cast her lot. “How long must we stay here?”
“As long as the air lasts, and I’d like to stay here longer than that. We don’t want
to move around any more than we absolutely have to until their rays are off of us, and
we have no way of knowing how long that’ll be. Also, we’d better keep still. I don’t know
what kind of an audio system they’ve got, but there’s no use taking unnecessary
chances.”
“All x—I’m an oyster’s little sister,” and for many minutes the two remained
motionless and silent. Now and then Nadia twitched and started at some vague real or
imaginary sound—now and then her fingers tightened upon his biceps—and he pressed
her hand with his arm in reassurance and understanding. Once a wall of their cell
resounded under the impact of a fierce blow and Stevens instantly threw his arm around
the girl, twisting himself between her and the threatened wall, ready for any emergency.
But nothing more happened, the door remained closed, the cell stayed bottle-tight, and
time wore slowly on. All too soon the unmistakable symptoms of breathing an unfit
atmosphere made themselves apparent and Stevens, after testing each of the doors,
drew the girl into a larger room, where they breathed deeply of the fresh, cool air.
“How did you know that this room was whole ?” asked Nadia. “We might have
stepped out into space, mightn’t we?”
“No; if this room had lost its tightness the door wouldn’t have opened. They won’t
open if there’s a difference of one kilogram pressure on the two sides. That’s how I
knew that the room we were in at first was cut in two— the door into that air-break
wouldn’t move.”
“What comes next?”
“I don’t know exactly what to do—we’d better hold a little council of war. They
may have gone . . .” Stevens broke off as the structure began to move, and they settled
down upon what had been one of the side-walls. Greater and greater became the
acceleration, until their apparent weight was almost as much as it would have been
upon the Earth, at which point it became constant. “. . . but they haven’t,” he continued
the interrupted sentence. “This seems to be a capture and seizure, as well as an attack,
so we’ll have to take the risk of looking at them. Besides, it’s getting cold in here. One or
two of the adjoining cells have apparently been ruptured and we’re radiating our heat
out into space, so we’ll have to get into a lifeboat or freeze. I’ll go pick out the best one.
Wonder if I’d better take you with me, or hide you and come back after you ?”
“Don’t worry about that—I’m coming with you,” Nadia declared, positively.
“Just as well, probably,” he assented, and they set out. A thorough exploration of
all the tight connecting cells revealed that not a lifeboat within their reach remained
intact, but that habitable and navigable portions of three such craft were available.
Selecting the most completely equipped of these, they took up their residence therein
by entering it and closing the massive insulating door. Stevens disconnected all the
lights save one, and so shielded that one before turning it on that it merely lightened the
utter darkness into a semi-permeable gloom. He then stepped up to the lookout plate,
and with his hand upon the control, pondered long the possible consequences of what
he wished to do.
“What harm would it do to take just a little peek?”
“I don’t know—that’s the dickens of it. Maybe none, and then again, maybe a lot.