The ship suddenly seemed a stranger to me. So cold. So vibrationless.
Broken lights. These slanting wrecked corridors. With the ventilating
fans stilled, the air was turning fetid. Chilling. And thinning, with
escaping pressure, rarefying so that I could feel the grasp of it in
my lungs and the pin-pricks in my cheeks.
We started off. Four of us, still alive in this silent ship of death.
My blurred thoughts tried to cope with it all. Venza here. I
remembered how she had bade me create a diversion when the women
passengers were landing on the asteroid. She had carried out her
purpose! In the confusion she had not gone ashore. A stowaway here.
She had secured the cloak. Prowling, to try and help us, she had come
upon Hahn. Had seized his ray cylinder and struck him down, and been
herself knocked unconscious by his dying lunge, which also had broken
the tubes and wrecked the _Planetara_. And Venza, unconscious, had
been lying here with the mechanism of her cloak still operating, so
that we did not see her when we came and found why Hahn did not answer
my signals.
"It's here, Gregg."
Snap and I lifted the pile of Moon equipment to which she referred.
We located four suits and helmets and the mechanisms to operate them.
"More are in the chart room," Anita said.
But we needed no others. I robed Anita and showed her the mechanisms.
Snap was helping Venza. We were all stiff from the cold; but within
the suits and their pulsing currents, the blessed warmth came again.
The helmets had ports through which food and drink could be taken. I
stood with my helmet ready. Anita, Venza and Snap were bloated and
grotesque beside me. We had found food and water here, assembled in
portable cases which the brigands had prepared. Snap lifted them, and
signaled to me he was ready.
My helmet shut out all sounds save my own breathing, my pounding
heart, and the murmur of the mechanism. The warmth and pure air were
good.
We reached the hull port locks. They operated! We went through in the
light of the headlamps over our foreheads.
I closed the locks after us: an instinct to keep the air in the ship
for the other trapped humans lying in there.
We slid down the sloping side of the _Planetara_. We were unweighted,
irrationally agile with this slight gravity. I fell a dozen feet and
landed with barely a jar.
We were out on the Lunar surface. A great sloping ramp of crags
stretched down before us. Gray-black rock tinged with Earthlight. The
Earth hung amid the stars in the blackness overhead like a huge
section of a glowing yellow ball.
This grim, desolate, silent landscape! Beyond the ramp, fifty feet
below us, a tumbled naked plain stretched away into blurred distance.
But I could see mountains off there. Behind us, the towering, frowning
rampart-wall of Archimedes loomed against the sky.
I had turned to look back at the _Planetara_. She lay broken, wedged
between spires of upstanding rock. A few of her lights still gleamed.
The end of the _Planetara_!
The three grotesque figures of Anita, Venza and Snap had started off.
Hunchback figures with the tanks mounted on their shoulders. I bounded
and caught them. I touched Snap. We made audiphone contact.
"Which way do you think?" I demanded.
"I think this way, down the ramp. Away from Archimedes, toward the
mountains. It shouldn't be too far."
"You run with Venza. I'll hold Anita."