But there was more, and equally bad. The drive had acted in a wholly unprecedented fashion. The spaceboat had attained and still possessed a velocity they could not guess at, in a direction they could not determine, and it would be distinctly unwise to try to use the drive before the cause of its misbehavior could be found out.
The question of air was most urgent. Dunne searched for the cause of the punched round holes. He found something on the cabin floor that had obviously made one of them. It was a slug of hard, pointed metal with a hollow in its unpointed end in which some substance had plainly burned.
He touched helmets with Nike again. Solid conduction carried his voice to her.
“I’ve found out what hit us!” he told her. “Queer! It’s an antique weapon everybody’s forgotten. It’s like a belt-weapon except it can shoot an indefinite number of times. It’s called a machine gun. It shoots missiles, called tracer bullets in the old days. We couldn’t have kept from losing our air. We couldn’t have gotten into space-suits in time to survive!”
Nike did not speak.
“And it’s an antique!” insisted Dunne. “It’s like being shot with a bow and arrow! Maybe Haney’ll try to track us down to be sure we’re dead. We’ve a terrific built-up speed, though. If I can patch the holes, we may make out yet. This isn’t a donkeyship! It’s a lifeboat!”
He moved away. The lights in the lifeboat continued to burn. He hunted briskly for the emergency tools a lifeboat would carry. He found them. There were absurd provisions against the improbable. There were not only tools but seeds-as if a space-ship could be wrecked and a lifeboat make ground on an uninhabited world equivalent to a desert island, with an appropriate atmosphere and a 801-type sun and a tolerable temperature-range, but lacking all edible plants!
He also found emergency sealing-putty which does not harden unless some part of a mass of it is touched to metallic iron, when it polymerizes swiftly to a solid that adheres to anything and becomes almost as hard as iron itself. He took it to the airlock. A round ball of putty pushed into the bullet hole sealed it. He tapped it with the knuckles of his space-gauntlet. The bullet hole was patched. He went to the others, in turn. He had to tear away metal to get at some of the holes in the hull, but he worked swiftly.
He was absorbed in his task, but Nike could not understand it. She saw their situation clearly: When the oxygen in their suit-tanks was gone, they would die. She was alive now only because Dunne had ordered her to seal her helmet before they were attacked. But they could breathe only as long as their space-suits permitted. If there were a place to which they could go—and there wasn’t—they wouldn’t have been able to breathe long enough to reach it. There was nothing imaginable to be done. They could use some few reserve tanks and stay alive a little longer. But why? It would only postpone the inevitable—death! Anybody can die, but there are things one wants to do first! One can hate the frustration of an early death without being afraid of it.
Dunne finished patching the last hole. He went briskly back to the storage spaces of the spaceboat. Nike looked at the gauge of her oxygen tanks.
She saw Dunne, absorbed again, making electrical connections of heavy blue cables to things she recognized as fuel cells. In them, space-fuel could be used to produce electric current directly. During the time Dunne had waited vainly for radar signs of visitors, he’d done such things as he was doing now. Then, Nike hadn’t asked what it was. Now there seemed no point in asking. Then, she’d tried to avoid speech with Dunne, which was folly. Now rebellious, it seemed folly not to.
He moved back from the electrical connections and came toward her. She looked at him in desperation. He touched their helmets together.
“This is a lifeboat,” he said exuberantly, “and not a donkeyship. Lucky, eh?”
She realized drearily that he wanted her to agree with him. She nodded, but could not trust herself to speak.
“We use a pound of oxygen a day apiece,” he said with something like zest. “Donkeyships use oxygen in tanks under pressure. It’s cheaper. But a lifeboat has to be designed for a lot of people. Water’s more expensive but more. practical. It costs more to get oxygen from water, counting the fuel to electrolyze it, but a gallon of water and the fuel to get the oxygen from it weighs a lot less than eight pounds of oxygen in a pressure tank!”
It took time for these comments to become relevant. Then Nike said incredulously, “You mean—you’re putting air back into the ship?”
“Not air,” he corrected. “Oxygen. The same stuff we’re breathing now in our space-suits. We breathe it at three pounds pressure because we’ve no nitrogen to dilute it with. At full pressure and undiluted it would make us drunk, anyhow!”
“But—”
“We use a pound a day apiece,” Dunne repeated. “This being a lifeboat, we can turn out twenty-five if we must. We’re all right for oxygen!”
Nike knew relief that seemed almost shameful. But she said with a dry throat, “And the engine? The drive?”
“I’ve no idea,” said Dunne. “I have to see about that now.”
He went away, nodding to give reassurance. Nike stared at him in an entirely new fashion. It is the instinct of a woman to look to a man in emergencies. She had depended on her brother. She hadn’t known that there was anybody else in whom she could feel the same confidence. Dunne had been a stranger; now, abruptly, he was a person who provided air when the spaceboat was drained of it. He was the person who’d gotten a lifeboat to go find her brother when his donkeyship was destroyed and there was no other way. He’d even been prepared for the attack.
She watched as he uncovered the fuse-box which distributed electricity to various places in the spaceboat. There was a take-off for light, for the air-freshener, for heat and instrumentation and refuse-cycling. And of course, for the drive.
There was a neat round depression in the box cover. A bullet had penetrated the spaceboat’s hull and made a deep dent in the distributor. Then it had fallen to the floor.
Dunne took off the cover. The intricate wiring was pushed about. There was a short-circuit.
He corrected the short. He made an abortive movement with his hand, as if to scratch his head reflectively. He put the distributor box together. He hauled up a floor plate and inspected the drive under the floor. He shook his head. Gingerly, with his movements clumsy because of the gauntlets he must wear, he brought the thrust-blocks up to view. The copper blocks were almost red-hot.
Squatting, over them, he stared at what he saw. Nike went to look. She felt not only astonishment but something much more important and basic.
He spoke to her. Naturally, she couldn’t hear him. She touched her helmet to his.
“The current got shorted through the drive-crystal,” he told her, in a voice made tinny by the method of its passage to her. “Away over normal voltage—overloaded the crystal. It pushed like the devil, but it burned up in doing so. Look!”
He showed her the closely approaching copper blocks, with a single shred of greasy crystal in between.
“It’s ruined?” asked Nike.
“It’d have blown everything in minutes,” he said. “It was just burning out when you cut off the juice.”
He frowned down at the massive thrust-blocks, held apart by the most infinitesimal of single grains of the most precious mineral in the cosmos. A donkeyship needed a half-gram crystal to make its drive operate. A lifeboat needed something larger. A liner on an interplanetary run required a crystal or crystals costing more than its hull and interior and all its furnishings together. The almost-burned-out crystal between the spaceboat’s thrust-blocks was now no larger than a grain of sugar.