“Yes, I know. But you work off your primitive emotions with too much gusto. Even a cast-iron gym slugger can bruise. That last blow was—brutal. Just because Slashaway gets thumped and thudded all over by the medical staff twice a week doesn’t mean he can take—”
The stratoship lurched suddenly. The deck heaved up under Lawton’s feet, hurling him against Captain Forrester and spinning both men around so that they seemed to be waltzing together across the ship. The still limp gym slugger slid downward, colliding with a corrugated metal bulkhead and sloshing back and forth like a wet mackerel.
A full minute passed before Lawton could put a stop to that. Even while careening he had been alive to Slashaway’s peril, and had tried to leap to his aid. But the ship’s steadily increasing gyrations had hurled him away from the skipper and against a massive vaulting horse, barking the flesh from his shins and spilling him with violence onto the deck.
He crawled now toward the prone gym slugger on his hands and knees, his temples thudding. The gyrations ceased an instant before he reached Slashaway’s side. With an effort he lifted the big man up, propped him against the bulkhead and shook him until his teeth rattled. “Slashaway,” he muttered. “Slashaway, old fellow.”
Slashaway opened blurred eyes, “Phew!” he muttered. “You sure socked me hard, sir.”
“You went out like a light,” explained Lawton gently. “A minute before the ship lurched.”
“The ship lurched, sir?”
“Something’s very wrong, Slashaway. The ship isn’t moving. There are no vibrations and—Slashaway, are you hurt? Your skull thumped against that bulkhead so hard I was afraid—”
“Naw, I’m okay. Whatd’ya mean, the ship ain’t moving? How could it stop?”
Lawton said. “I don’t know, Slashaway.” Helping the gym slugger to his feet he stared apprehensively about him. Captain Forrester was kneeling on the resin testing his hocks for sprains with splayed fingers, his features twitching.
“Hurt badly, sir?”
The Commander shook his head. “I don’t think so. Dave, we are twenty thousand feet up, so how in hell could we be stationary in space?”
“It’s all yours, skipper.”
“I must say you’re helpful.”
Forrester got painfully to his feet and limped toward the athletic compartment’s single quartz port—a small circle of radiance on a level with his eyes. As the port sloped downward at an angle of nearly sixty degrees all he could see was a diffuse glimmer until he wedged his brow in the observation visor and stared downward.
Lawton heard him suck in his breath sharply. “Well, sir?”
“There are thin cirrus clouds directly beneath us. They’re not moving.”
Lawton gasped, the sense of being in an impossible situation swelling to nightmare proportions within him. What could have happened?
Directly behind him, close to a bulkhead chronometer, which was clicking out the seconds with unabashed regularity, was a misty blue visiplate that merely had to be switched on to bring the pilots into view.
The Commander hobbled toward it, and manipulated a rheostat. The two pilots appeared side by side on the screen, sitting amidst a spidery network of dully gleaming pipe lines and nichrome humidification units. They had unbuttoned their high-altitude coats and their stratosphere helmets were resting on their knees. The Jablochoff candle light which flooded the pilot room accentuated the haggardness of their features, which were a sickly cadaverous hue.
The captain spoke directly into the visiplate. “What’s wrong with the ship?” he demanded. “Why aren’t we descending? Dawson, you do the talking!”
One of the pilots leaned tensely forward, his shoulders jerking. “We don’t know, sir. The rotaries went dead when the ship started gyrating. We can’t work the emergency torps and the temperature is rising.”
“But—it defies all logic,” Forrester muttered. “How could a metal ship weighing tons be suspended in the air like a balloon? It is stationary, but it is not buoyant. We seem in all respects to be frozen in.”
“The explanation may be simpler than you dream,” Lawton said. “When we’ve found the key.”
The Captain swung toward him. “Could you find the key, Dave?”
“I should like to try. It may be hidden somewhere on the ship, and then again, it may not be. But I should like to go over the ship with a fine-tooth comb, and then I should like to go over outside, thoroughly. Suppose you make me an emergency mate and give me a carte blanche, sir.”
Lawton got his carte blanche. For two hours he did nothing spectacular, but he went over every inch of the ship. He also lined up the crew and pumped them. The men were as completely in the dark as the pilots and the now completely recovered Slashaway, who was following Lawton about like a doting seal.
“You’re a right guy, sir. Another two or three cracks and my noggin would’ve split wide open.”
“But not like an eggshell, Slashaway. Pig iron develops fissures under terrific pounding but your cranium seems to be more like tempered steel. Slashaway, you won’t understand this, but I’ve got to talk to somebody and the Captain is too busy to listen.
“I went over the entire ship because I thought there might be a hidden source of buoyancy somewhere. It would take a lot of air bubbles to turn this ship into a balloon, but there are large vacuum chambers under the multiple series condensers in the engine room which conceivably could have sucked in a helium leakage from the carbon pile valves. And there are bulkhead porosities which could have clogged.”
“Yeah,” muttered Slashaway, scratching his head. “I see what you mean, sir.”
“It was no soap. There’s nothing inside the ship that could possibly keep us up. Therefore there must be something outside that isn’t air. We know there is air outside. We’ve stuck our heads out and sniffed it. And we’ve found out a curious thing.
“Along with the oxygen there is water vapor, but it isn’t H2O. It’s HO. A molecular arrangement like that occurs in the upper Solar atmosphere, but nowhere on Earth. And there’s a
