He went into the airlock. In instants he had the outer door open. He had a lifeline clipped to an eyebolt. He had his bazooka—tied by a cord to his belt—ready for instant use.
The spaceboat was then perhaps a yard from the giant rock that had his and Keyes’ initials on it. That was a claim of ownership to which nobody paid any attention if they could avoid it. He saw Smithers. That small person flung his ropeloops ahead of him and pulled on them with extraordinary speed and skill. He reached the mooring line of his battered donkeyship. He jerked at it and the rope was released. Then, clinging to it and climbing it hand-over-hand in monkeylike fashion, he swarmed out on it toward his donkeyship, The line did not sag, because there was no weight; but it twisted and writhed as he climbed.
Dunne strained his ears. He heard no sound of any space-drive in his phones. But the radar had been explicit. Something sped toward this rock from many miles away, from invisibility behind the floating, sunlit, ever-present dust-fog of the Rings.
Smithers reached his own airlock. He swung inside and the outer door closed, but not quite. He opened it again and snatched in the rope. He vanished, and the door closed again, this time firmly.
Then his voice came almost instantly on the donkeyship’s transmitter instead of his helmet-phone.
“You, Haney!” he cried shrilly, “you sheer off! You keep away from here! No tricks! There’s a lady here! Keep away!”
Yet nothing seemed to be happening. There was a moving blip on the radar screen in the lifeboat. Dunne stood in the airlock door with a bazooka ready to be raised and fired. Nike, frightened, nevertheless went to the lifeboat’s control board to try to make use of the lessons Dunne had given her in the handling of a ship. The lifeboat floated with tremendous, dignified deliberation away from the Ring-rock, which moved very slowly around some axis it had discovered within itself. Smithers’ donkeyship hung suspended in emptiness, now that its mooring line had been drawn inside. And nothing happened. The stony mass hid a part of the glowing mist which seemed elsewhere to fill all the universe there was.
When the action came, it was too swift to follow. At one instant there were only the three objects floating in nothingness: spaceboat, donkeyship, and huge mass of brown stone crystals with a slash of gray mixture on one side. Dunne raised his bazooka, waiting grimly for a target.
There was a great flash of bright metal. A shape moving too fast and too near to be clearly seen, rushed past the edge of the floating rock. Flashings of light seemed to make a line along its length. Sparks flew. Some of them bounced from the mass of stone. Some seemed to sink into the lifeboat. There was a sort of gridiron of parallel streaks of light going away into the mist beyond the lifeboat. And something else flashed toward infinity and was gone.
And then the lifeboat moved. It seemed to leap. Dunne was flung back and out of the airlock. He fell, with his bazooka—tied to his belt as it was—lost to his fingers. The line from his belt to the eyebolt on the lifeboat tightened. It came taut with a violence that almost cut him in two. But it did stretch. The lifeboat, though, flung forward with a sort of frenzied energy, with greater acceleration than its drive was ever intended to produce. It drove off to nowhere with such velocity that it seemed to shrink in size like a broken toy balloon, and there was nothing left where it had been except the seventy-foot mass of stone with painted letters and numerals on it, and a donkeyship from which a bewildered and plaintive voice began to call, “Dunne! Dunne! What’s happened? Where are y’?”
And a long, long distance away, inside the spaceboat, Nike gathered herself up where the shock of explosive acceleration had flung her. She began to crawl uphill toward the controls again. Outside, Dunne’s lifeline stretched itself to its limit from the eyebolt. He dangled, moving feebly at its end.
There was no reaction to this event anywhere else. After all, the Rings were some four hundred miles thick, and they formed a shining golden disk nearly two hundred thousand miles across, though its center was largely occupied by the gas-giant world of Thothmes. In nearly two hundred million cubic miles of glowing haze, what happened to a single space-ship’s lifeboat was not apt to appear important. Yet it seemed that a somehow agitated “tweet… tweet… tweet!” sped out from somewhere nearby, and Smithers’ voice called dolefully, “Dunne! Dunne! What’s happened t’you?”
And there was no answer.
Nike crept to the lifeboat’s controls inch by inch. Struggling against the intolerable acceleration, she got within reach of the controls. She reached up and pulled a switch Dunne had shown her.
Instantly the drive ceased. The acceleration stopped. And then it seemed that the spaceboat, in ceasing to drive, began to fall and fall, toward infinity.
Outside, Dunne struggled feebly with the lifeline that had dragged him in the boat’s wake. The elastic rope shortened itself. It drew him back. It gave him a certain momentum relative to the spaceboat. He took up the slack and pulled harder. If there had been air outside, of course, he would have thrashed wildly about until the lifeline parted or he crashed against the boat’s steel hull. But here was only glowing vacuum. There was no resistance to his motion.
He caught the airlock doorframe. He got in. His bazooka bumped. He pulled it into the lock. He dragged the outer lock-door shut—and saw a hole in it.
It was a round hole not quite half an inch in diameter. But it meant that the airlock could never be filled with air so the inner door would come unlocked. He was locked out. By every rule known to spacemen it should not be possible to open the inner door to what was effectively empty space.
In a species of peevish fury and fretting horror, he struck the door handle.
And the door opened.
He stepped inside, unbelieving. The door shut behind him. He was suddenly and insanely aware that his suit ballooned and billowed at its flexible joinings. This was the way the suit was in empty space. The inside of the lifeboat was airless. It was empty space.
He saw movement. Nike had turned incredulously from where she’d cut off the drive. She gave a little cry and raised her hand to her space-helmet. She’d sealed it on Dunne’s command just before the attack from nowhere. Dunne shouted and leaped. He caught and held her hand from opening her helmet to the emptiness which had invaded and conquered the lifeboat.
“Wait! ” he snapped. “Look at your suit!”
He held her. He pointed to the proofs that there was no air, that the inside of the lifeboat was as empty of anything to breathe as space between a pair of stars. He cut off her helmet-phone. He cut off his own. Then he touched the metal of his helmet to the metal of hers.
“Keep your helmet shut!” he commanded. “We’ve lost our air! The hull’s punctured: The air’s all gone!”
The sound went by solid conduction from helmet to helmet. She stared at him. He said, more urgently still, “Don’t talk by space-phone! Maybe we can patch up!”
He released her. A space-suit, normally, would have oxygen in its tanks for two hours of breathing. The ship had none, if it had leaked as the. evidence indicated. Dunne had seen one opening in the hull. It looked like the holes in the bubble in which Keyes had died.
“Let’s see how bad the leaking is!”
She didn’t hear him say that, but she saw him examine the hole in the. outer lock-door. Then he went looking for more. He found them. Nearly a dozen, in all—round holes that looked as if they’d been drilled, but with fringes of torn metal that said they’d been punched. Anyone of them would have bled the ship’s air to space. Suddenly he realized how they’d been made. Everyone had been made within the fraction of a second, while something flashed past and away from the spot where he’d been waiting with a bazooka!