"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 casements.
"Thank God 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 space.
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 space. 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 passed 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
retarded, with the mass 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_.
I gazed at the wreck of the _Cometara_. My ship! My first command! So
smoothly, confidently rising from the Earth only a few hours ago; and
she had come to this. She lay askew in the heavens. The dome was
cracked throughout all its length and smashed like a shell at the
sterntip.
I could see the interior litter beneath the dome, the twisted and
strained lines of the hull. A dead ship now, the mechanisms stilled;
dead and silent inside, with all the warmth gone out of it. All the
air dissipated, so that in every cubby, every dark corridor of that
broken hull there was the coldness and silence of interplanetary
space.
I suppose these thoughts swept me within a few seconds. I saw myself
starting to revolve in my orbit. Perhaps my motion would carry me
around indefinitely; or I might be drawn down to the vessel as those
other survivors had been drawn.
Grantline, with one of the few power suits, was coming toward me now,
with tiny fluorescent streams back along his body from his shoulder
blades. I switched on my own mechanism. It moved me toward him, and
our gravity attracted us. We shut off the power when twenty feet
apart; drifted together; contacted; bounced apart like rubber balls as
our inflated suits struck. Then in a moment we had drifted back and
clung.