Like a loose piece of plastic dislodged from its angle of rest and
slithering down, pull yourself together Lizzie Lee.
I look through the door into the other half of this level. Shambles.
Smashed machinery every which way, blocking the door, blocking
everything. No way through at all.
Suddenly I remember the tools. Mr. Yardo loaded the fish-boat with all
it would take. I crawl back and return with a fifteen inch expanding
beam-lever, and overuse it; the jammed trap door does not slide back
in its grooves but flips right out of them, bent double; it flies off
into the dark and clangs its way to rest.
I am halfway through the opening when I hear the sound again. A soft
slithering; a faint defeated thump.
I freeze where I am, and then I hear the sigh; a long, long weary
sound, almost musical.
An air leak somewhere in the hull and wind or waves altering the air
pressure below.
All the same I do not seem able to come any farther through this door.
Light might help; I turn the beam up and play it cautiously around.
This is the last compartment, right in the nose; a sawn-off
cone-shape. No breaks here, though the hull is buckled to my left and
the "floor"--the partition, horizontal when the ship is in the normal
operating position, which holds my trap door--is torn up; some large
heavy object was welded to a thin surface skin which has ripped away
leaving jagged edges and a pattern of girders below.
There is no dust here; it has all been sucked out when the ship was
open to space; nothing to show the beam except the sliding yellow
ellipse where it touches the wall. It glides and turns, spiraling
down, deformed every so often where it crosses a projection or a dent,
till it halts suddenly on a spoked disk, four feet across and standing
nearly eighteen inches out from the wall. The antigrav.
I never saw one this size, it is like the little personal affairs as a
giant is like a pigmy, not only bigger but a bit different in
proportion. I can see an Andite cartridge fastened among the spokes.
The fuse is a "sympathizer" but it is probably somewhere close. The
ellipse moves again. There is no feeling that I control it; it is
hunting on its own. To and fro around the giant wheel. Lower. It halts
on a small flat box, also bolted to the wall, a little way below. This
is it, I can see the dial.
The ellipse stands still, surrounding the fuse. There is something at
the very edge of it.
When _Gilgamesh_ was right way up the antigrav was bolted to one wall,
about three feet above the floor. Now the lowest point is the place
where this wall joins what used to be the floor. Something has fallen
down to that point and is huddled there in the dark.
The beam jerks suddenly up and the breath whoops out of me; a round
thing sticking out of the wall--then I realize it is an archaic
space-helmet, clamped to the wall for safety when the wearer took it
off.
I take charge of the ellipse of light and move it slowly down, past
the fuse, to the thing below. A little dark scalloping of the edge of
the light. The tips of fingers. A hand.