Gefty grunted, blinked sweat from his eyes, and took hold of the
handgrips of the heavy mining cutter again, turning it nose down towards
the vault floor. The guide light found the point he was working on, and
the slice beam stabbed out, began nibbling delicately away to extend the
curving line it had eaten through the _Queen's_ thick skin. He had drawn
a twenty-five foot circle around Maulbow's battered control unit and the
instruments attached to it, well outside the fragile-looking safety
field. The circle was broken at four points where he would plant
explosives. The explosives, going off together, should shatter the
connecting links with the hull and throw the machine clear. If that
didn't release them immediately from its influence, he would see what
putting the _Queen's_ drives into action would do.
"Gefty?" Kerim's voice asked.
"Uh-huh?"
He could hear her swallow over the intercom. "Those lights are back
now."
"How many?"
"Two," Kerim said. "I _think_ they're only two. They keep crossing back
and forth in front of us." She laughed nervously. "It's idiotic, of
course, but I do get the feeling they're looking at us."
Gefty said hesitantly, "Everything's set but I need another minute or
two to get this last connection whittled down a little more. If I blow
the charge too soon, it mightn't take the gadget clean out of the ship."
Kerim said, "I know. I'll just watch ... they just disappeared again."
Her voice changed. "Now there's something else."
"What's that?"
"You know you said to watch the cargo lock lights on the emergency
panel."
"Yes."
"The outer lock door has just been opened."
"What!"
"It must have been. The light started blinking red just now as I was
looking at it."
Gefty was silent a moment, his mind racing. Why would the janandra open
the lock? From what Maulbow had said, it could live for a while without
air, but it still could gain nothing but eventual death from leaving the
ship--
Unless, Gefty thought, the janandra had become aware in some way that he
was about to blow their machine out of the _Queen_. There were grappling
lines in the cargo lock, and if four or five of those lines were slapped
to the circular section of the hull he'd loosened ...
"Kerim," he said.
"Yes?"
"I'm going to blow the deal right now. Got your suit snapped to the wall
braces like I showed you?"
"Yes, Gefty." Her voice was faint but clear.
He turned the cutter away from the line it had dug, sent it rolling off
towards the far wall. He hurried around the circle, checking the four
charges, lumbered over to the vault passage, stopped just around the
corner. He took the firing box from his suit.
"Ready, Kerim?" He opened the box.
"Ready...."
"Here goes!" Gefty reached into the box, twisted the firing handle.
Light flared in the vault. The deck shook below him. He came stumbling
out from behind the wall.
Maulbow's machine and its stand of instruments had vanished. Where it
had stood was a dark circular hole. Nothing else seemed to have
happened. Gefty clumped hurriedly over to the mining cutter, swung it
around, started more cautiously back towards the hole. He didn't have
the faintest idea what would come next, but a definite possibility was
that he would see the janandra's dark form flowing up over the rim of
the hole. Letting it run into the cutter beam might be the best way to
discourage it from re-entering the _Queen_.
[Illustration]
Instead, a dazzling brilliance suddenly blotted out everything. The
cutter was plucked from Gefty's grasp; then he was picked up, suit and
all, and slammed up towards the vault ceiling. He had a feeling that
inaudible thunders were shaking the ship. He seemed to be rolling over
and over along the ceiling. At last, the suit crashed into something
which showed a total disinclination to yield, and Gefty blacked out.
* * * * *
The left side of his face felt pushed out of shape; his left eye wasn't
functioning too well, and there was a severe pulsing ache throughout the
top of his head. But Gefty felt happy.
There were a few qualifying considerations.
"Of course," he pointed out to Kerim, "all we can really say immediately
is that we're back in normspace and somewhere in the galaxy."