Without a glance at the curious furnishings of the craft, Trace Roscoe
headed for the door on the right-hand side. It was a tall rectangle,
like an earth-made door, but without knob; as Trace came within a
foot of it, it slid into the wall so briskly that he would not have
touched it had he been coming at a dead run. Electric eye, or the same
principle, he thought, striding forward.
Nor was there anyone in this room, which was plainly a sleeping
chamber. Trace marched for the next barrier, but Slough darted over to
investigate a narrower door, and thus discovered the first two Graken.
The vanishing portal showed a lavatory, and the pair of greenies stared
up, startled, from a massive washbowl, in which they had been bathing
their faces and bare arms. Their helmets were slung on wall pegs. Both
of them went for their pistols, but Trace, not so surprised as they,
beat them to the draw. He fired over the tiny man's shoulder, and the
Graken died, their flesh dissolving into steam and fragments.
Barbara Skye said her first word in an hour. It was triumphant, but
quite unprintable. Jane Kelly said nothing, but she grinned at the
other girl with appreciation.
Trace bethought himself of the old Western axiom, that one good man
with a rifle was worth four good men with revolvers. He took the big
sporting gun from Johnson, and, thrusting his ray pistol into the front
of his shirt where it would be handy, walked purposefully at the next
door. He had a feeling about this one.
He wasn't wrong. Three aliens grouped around a table, bending above
some chart or mathematical calculation, turned and rose as he stepped
into the doorway. Two of them he blasted before they had glimpsed him,
and the third he took in the face with a heavy slug just as the beast
was opening his mouth to shout or challenge. The rifle echoed like
artillery in the small room, and Trace thought with a momentary despair
that it had likely been heard all through the ship. He stepped over the
twitching corpses and went on.
This time the door opened before he had neared it, and a green man,
ready and tensed, stood on the threshold with a gun in his big fist.
Trace, caught for an instant unawares, went to his knees and jerked up
his pistol; it shot its deadly thin stream of force on the heels of the
alien's, and he saw it strike the broad chest and begin to disintegrate
the whole being. The Graken's shot had missed.
Well, it had missed _him_, Trace realized, as he heard the sharp gasps
behind him. He looked and saw Kinkaid's headless body topple over
between Barbara and Jane. It proved the incredible depth of the women's
feeling for this fight and this terrible problem, for neither of them
screamed....
Shoulder to shoulder Trace and Bill Blacknight went through the room
and their pistols' beams snaked out without sound together, as before
them the control panels and intricate machinery of the pilot cubicle
appeared behind three tall green-skinned Graken. Slough's revolver
bellowed hoarsely behind them. Bill felt a tug at his coat, and later
discovered that a great patch of cloth had been burned away by the
enemy's rays. Johnson, half-crazed with anger now and gone quite
berserk, plunged past them as they fired at the aliens and the last
spitting stream from a pistol caught him in the belly and burst his
body asunder.
They were in the control room, the six who had come this far alive, and
the door through which they had leaped would not close. Bill fumbled
wildly at the jamb, at the edge that was flush with the wall, and then
Slough said, "The bodies! Roll away the bodies!"
Hafnagel and Bill took unpleasantly blasted corpses by the heels and
dragged them out of the cubicle; then, having cleared the space near
the door, it slid swiftly shut, leaving them outside. They went to it,
it opened, and at last the six were together in a shut room.
Trace handed his pistol to Hafnagel. "Can you trigger it?" he asked,
thinking of the man's stiff fingers. Hafnagel put out his hand and
flexed it easily. "Don't ask me why," he said shortly. "It happened
when we came into this thing." He took the weapon.
"Nervous release," said Trace. "I've seen it happen under fire."
He turned to the bank of mechanisms, the sprawling panels full of
controls. "Brother," he said under his breath. Then he went to work,
trusting the others to guard his back.
Even when he heard Slough's revolver bang twice, he did not look up
from the things he was working on.