The Skylark of Space - E. E. Smith (e book reading free txt) 📗

was getting a little out of plumb with the bar all this last watch. I didn’t pay much attention to it, as I couldn’t see anything out of the way. Nothing but a sun could be big enough to raise all this disturbance, and I can’t see any close enough to be afraid of, can you?”

“No, and I cannot see the Steel space-car, either. Look sharp.”

“Of course,” Seaton continued to argue as he peered out into the night, “it is theoretically possible that a heavenly body can exist large enough so that it could exert even this much force and still appear no larger than an ordinary star, but I don’t believe it is probable. Give me three or four minutes of visual angle and I’ll believe anything, but none of these stars are big enough to have any visual angle at all. Furthermore⁠ ⁠…”

“There is at least half a degree of visual angle!” broke in his friend intensely. “Just to the left of that constellation that looks so much like a question mark. It is not bright, but dark, like a very dark moon⁠—barely perceptible.”

Seaton pointed his glass eagerly in the direction indicated.

“Great Cat!” he ejaculated. “I’ll say that’s some moon! Wouldn’t that rattle your slats? And there’s DuQuesne’s bus, too, on the right edge. Get it?”

As they stood up, Seaton’s mood turned to one of deadly earnestness, and a grave look came over Crane’s face as the seriousness of their situation dawned upon them. Trained mathematicians both, they knew instantly that that unknown world was of inconceivable mass, and that their chance of escape was none too good, even should they abandon the other craft to its fate. Seaton stared at Crane, his fists clenched and drops of perspiration standing on his forehead. Suddenly, with agony in his eyes and in his voice, he spoke.

“Mighty slim chance of getting away if we go through with it, old man⁠ ⁠… Hate like the devil⁠ ⁠… Have no right to ask you to throw yourself away, too.”

“Enough of that, Dick. You had nothing to do with my coming: you could not have kept me away. We will see it through.”

Their hands met in a fierce clasp, broken by Seaton, as he jumped to the levers with an intense:

“Well, let’s get busy!”

In a few minutes they had reduced the distance until they could plainly see the other vessel, a small black circle against the faintly luminous disk. As it leaped into clear relief in the beam of his powerful searchlight, Seaton focused the great attractor upon the fugitive car and threw in the lever which released the full force of that mighty magnet, while Crane attracted the attention of the vessel’s occupants by means of a momentary burst of solid machine-gun bullets, which he knew would glance harmlessly off the steel hull.

After an interminable silence, DuQuesne drew himself out of his seat. He took a long inhalation, deposited the butt of his cigarette carefully in his ash tray, and made his way to his room. He returned with three heavy fur suits provided with air helmets, two of which he handed to the girls, who were huddled in a seat with their arms around each other. These suits were the armor designed by Crane for use in exploring the vacuum and the intense cold of dead worlds. Airtight, braced with fine steel netting, and supplied with air at normal pressure from small tanks by automatic valves, they made their wearers independent of surrounding conditions of pressure and temperature.

“The next thing to do,” DuQuesne stated calmly, “is to get the copper off the outside of the ship. That is the last resort, as it robs us of our only safeguard against meteorites, but this is the time for last-resort measures. I’m going after that copper. Put these suits on, as our air will leave as soon as I open the door, and practically an absolute vacuum and equally absolute zero will come in.”

As he spoke, the ship was enveloped in a blinding glare and they were thrown flat as the vessel slowed down in its terrific fall. The thought flashed across DuQuesne’s mind that they had already entered the atmosphere of that monster globe and were being slowed down and set afire by its friction, but he dismissed it as quickly as it had come⁠—the light in that case would be the green of copper, not this bluish-white. His next thought was that there had been a collision of meteors in the neighborhood, and that their retardation was due to the outer coating. While these thoughts were flickering through his mind, they heard an insistent metallic tapping, which DuQuesne recognized instantly.

“A machine-gun!” he blurted in amazement. “How in⁠ ⁠…”

“It’s Dick!” screamed Dorothy, with flashing eyes. “He’s found us, just as I knew he would. You couldn’t beat Dick and Martin in a thousand years!”

The tension under which they had been laboring so long suddenly released, the two girls locked their arms around each other in a half-hysterical outburst of relief. Margaret’s meaningless words and Dorothy’s incoherent praises of her lover and Crane mingled with their racking sobs as each fought to recover self-possession.

DuQuesne had instantly mounted to the upper window. Throwing back the cover, he flashed his torch rapidly. The glare of the searchlight was snuffed out and he saw a flashing light spell out in dots and dashes:

“Can you read Morse?”

“Yes,” he signalled back. “Power gone, drifting into⁠ ⁠…”

“We know it. Will you resist?”

“No.”

“Have you fur pressure-suits?”

“Yes.”

“Put them on. Shut off your outer coating. Will touch so your upper door against our lower. Open, transfer quick.”

“OK”

Hastily returning to the main compartment, he briefly informed the girls as to what had happened. All three donned the suits and stationed themselves at the upper opening. Rapidly, but with unerring precision, the two ships were brought into place and held together by the attractor. As the doors were opened, there was a screaming hiss as the air of the vessels escaped through the narrow crack between them. The passengers