J. Foster turned to his secretary slowly. His ire had faded; there was only deep concern in his voice.
“Is he telling the truth, Malcolm?”
Greg said soberly, “Partly, sir. He’s overstating the danger—but there is danger. We are caught in a space-vortex, and as Mr. Breadon realized, the presence of these ionics means we’re in the Heaviside-layer of some heavenly body. But we may not crack up.”
Maud Andrews glanced at him shrewdly.
“Is there anything we can do?”
“Not a thing. The officers on the bridge are doing everything possible.”
“In that case,” said the older woman, “we might as well finish our breakfast. Here, Cuddles! Come to momsy!” She sat down again. Greg looked at her admiringly. Ralph Breadon stroked his brown jaw. He said, “The life-skiffs?”
“A last resort,” said Greg. “Sparks promised he’d let me know if it were necessary. We’ll hope it’s not—”
But it was a vain hope, vainly spoken in the last, vain moment. For even as he phrased the hopeful words, came the sound of swift, racing footsteps up the corridor. Into the dining dome burst Hannigan, eyes hot with excitement. And his cry dispelled Greg’s final hopes for safety.
“Everybody—the Number Four life-skiff—quick! We’ve been caught in a grav-drag and we’re going to crash!”
CHAPTER II
Those next hectic moments were never afterward very clear in Greg Malcolm’s memory. He had a confused recollection of hearing Sparks’ warning punctuated by a loud, shrill scream which he vaguely identified as emanating from Mrs. Andrews’ throat... He was conscious of feeling, suddenly, beneath his feet the sickening, quickening lurch of a ship out of control, gripped by gravitational forces beyond its power to allay... He recalled his own voice dinning in his ears as, incredibly, with Sparks, he took command of the hasty flight from the dining dome down the corridor to the aft ramp, up the ramp, across girdered beams in the super-structure to the small, independently motored rocket-skiff cradled there.
He was aware, too, of strangely disconnected incidents happening around him, he being a part of them but seeming to be only a disinterested spectator to their strangeness. Of his forcing Maud Andrews toward the door of the dome...of her pushing back against him with all the weight of her body...of her irate voice, “Cuddles! I forgot him!” Then the shrill excited yapping of the poodle cradled against her as they charged on down the corridor.
J. Foster waddling beside him, tugging at his arm, panting, “The officers?” and his own unfelt assurance. “They can take care of themselves. It’s a general ’bandon ship.” Enid Andrews stumbling over the hem of a filmy peignoir...himself bending to lift her boldly and bodily, sweating palms feeling the warm animal heat of her excited body hot beneath them... Crystal Andrews stopping suddenly, crying, “’Tina!”...and Hannigan’s reply, “Your maid? I woke her. She’s in the life-skiff.” Bert Andrews stopping suddenly, being sick in the middle of the corridor, his drunkenness losing itself in the thick, sure nausea of the ever-increasing unsteadiness beneath their feet.
Then the life-skiff, the clang of metal as Hannigan slammed the port behind the last of them, the fumbling for a lock-stud, the quick, grateful pant of the miniature hypos, and a weird feeling of weightlessness, rushingness, hurtlingness as his eardrums throbbed and his mouth tasted brassy and bloody with the fierce velocity of their escape.
Sense and meaning returned only when all this ended. As one waking from a nightmare dream, Greg Malcolm returned to a world he could recognize. A tiny world, encased within the walls of a forty-foot life-skiff. A world peopled too scantily. Andrews, his wife and sister, his son and daughter; Tina Laney, the maid; Breadon, Hannigan, young Tommy O’Doul, the cabin-boy (though where he had come from, or when, Greg did not know). And himself. In a life-skiff. In space.
Somewhere in space. He looked through the perilens. What he saw then he might better never have seen. For that shimmering pink-ochre veil had wisped away, now, and in the clean, cold, bitter-clear light of a distant sun he watched the death-dive of the yacht Carefree.
Like a vast silver top, spinning heedlessly, wildly, it streaked toward a mottled gray and green, brown and dun, hard and crushing-brutal terrain below. Still at its helm stood someone, for even in that last dreadful moment burst from its nose-jets a ruddy mushroom of flame that tried to, but could not, brake the dizzy fall.
For an instant Greg’s eyes, stingingly blinded and wet, thought they glimpsed a wee black mote dancing from the bowels of the Carefree; a mote that might be another skiff like their own. But he could not be sure, and then the Carefree was accelerating with such violence and speed that the eye could see it only as a flaming silver lance against the ugly earth-carcase beneath, and then it struck and a carmine bud of flame burst and flowered for an instant, and that was all....
And Greg Malcolm turned from the perilens, shaken.
Hannigan said, “It’s over?” and Greg nodded.
Hannigan said, “The other skiffs? Did they break free, or were they caught?”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t see for sure.”
“You must have seen. Are we the only ones?”
“I couldn’t see for sure. Maybe. Maybe not.”
Then a body scrambled forward, pressing through the tightness of other huddled bodies, and there was a hand upon his elbow. “I’ll take over now, Malcolm.”
* * * *
It was Ralph Breadon. Gregory looked at him slowly, uncomprehendingly at first. His hand was reluctant to leave the guiding-gear of the small ship which was, now, all that remained to them of civilization and civilization’s wondrous accomplishments. He had not realized until this moment that for a while...for a short, eager, pulse-quickening while...on his alertness, in his hands, had depended the destinies of ten men and women. But he knew, suddenly and completely, that it was for this single moment his whole lifetime had waited. It was for this brief moment of command that some intuition, some instinct greater than knowledge, had prepared him. This was why he, an Earthlubber, had studied astrogation, made a hobby of the empire of the stars. That he might be fitted to command when all others failed. And now—
And now the moment was past, and he was once again Gregory Malcolm, mild, lean, pale, bespectacled secretary to J. Foster Andrews. And the man at his side was Ralph Breadon, socialite and gentleman sportsman, trained pilot. And in Malcolm the habit of obedience was strong....
“Very well, sir,” he said. And he turned over the controls.
What happened then was unfortunate. It might just as well have happened to Malcolm, though afterward no one could ever say with certainty. However that was, either by carelessness or malfortune or inefficiency, once-thwarted disaster struck again at the little party on the life-skiff. At the instant Breadon’s hand seized the controls the skiff jerked suddenly as though struck with a ponderous fist, its throbbing motors choked and snarled in a high, rising crescendo of torment that lost itself in supersonic heights, and the ship that had been drifting easily and under control to the planet beneath now dipped viciously.
The misfortune was that too many huddled in the tiny space understood the operation of the life-skiff, and what must be done instantly. And that neither pilot was as yet in control of the ship. Breadon’s hand leaped for the Dixie rod, so, too, did Malcolm’s—and across both their bodies came the arm of Sparks Hannigan, searching the controls.
In the scramble someone’s sleeve brushed the banks of control-keys. The motors, killed, soughed into silence. The ship rocked into a spin. Greg cried out, his voice a strange harshness in his ears; Breadon cursed; one of the women bleated fearfully.
Then Breadon, still cursing, fought all hands from the controls but his own. And the man was not without courage.