“Gee,” muttered Slashaway. “We’re up against it, eh?”
Lawton was squatting on his hams beside an emergency ’chute opening on the deck of the Penguin’s weather observatory. He was letting down a spliced beryllium plumb line, his gaze riveted on the slowly turning horizontal drum of a windlass which contained more than two hundred feet of gleaming metal cordage.
Suddenly as he stared the drum stopped revolving. Lawton stiffened, a startled expression coming into his face. He had been playing a hunch that had seemed as insane, rationally considered, as his wild idea about the bulkhead porosities. For a moment he was stunned, unable to believe that he had struck pay dirt. The winch indicator stood at one hundred and three feet, giving him a rich, fruity yield of startlement.
One hundred feet below him the plummet rested on something solid that sustained it in space. Scarcely breathing, Lawton leaned over the windlass and stared downward. There was nothing visible between the ship and the fleecy clouds far below except a tiny black dot resting on vacancy and a thin beryllium plumb line ascending like an interrogation point from the dot to the ’chute opening.
“You see something down there?” Slashaway asked.
Lawton moved back from the windlass, his brain whirling. “Slashaway there’s a solid surface directly beneath us, but it’s completely invisible.”
“You mean it’s like a frozen cloud, sir?”
“No, Slashaway. It doesn’t shimmer, or deflect light. Congealed water vapor would sink instantly to earth.”
“You think it’s all around us, sir?”
Lawton stared at Slashaway aghast. In his crude fumblings the gym slugger had ripped a hidden fear right out of his subconsciousness into the light.
“I don’t know, Slashaway,” he muttered. “I’ll get at that next.”
A half hour later Lawton sat beside the captain’s desk in the control room, his face drained of all color. He kept his gaze averted as he talked. A man who succeeds too well with an unpleasant task may develop a subconscious sense of guilt.
“Sir, we’re suspended inside a hollow sphere which resembles a huge, floating soap bubble. Before we ripped through it it must have had a plastic surface. But now the tear has apparently healed over, and the shell all around us is as resistant as steel. We’re completely bottled up, sir. I shot rocket leads in all directions to make certain.”
The expression on Forrester’s face sold mere amazement down the river. He could not have looked more startled if the nearer planets had yielded their secrets chillingly, and a super-race had appeared suddenly on Earth.
“Good God, Dave. Do you suppose something has happened to space?”
Lawton raised his eyes with a shudder. “Not necessarily, sir. Something has happened to us. We’re floating through the sky in a huge, invisible bubble of some sort, but we don’t know whether it has anything to do with space. It may be a meteorological phenomenon.”
“You say we’re floating?”
“We’re floating slowly westward. The clouds beneath us have been receding for fifteen or twenty minutes now.”
“Phew!” muttered Forrester. “That means we’ve got to—”
He broke off abruptly. The Perseus’ radio operator was standing in the doorway, distress and indecision in his gaze. “Our reception is extremely sporadic, sir,” he announced. “We can pick up a few of the stronger broadcasts, but our emergency signals haven’t been answered.”
“Keep trying,” Forrester ordered.
“Aye, aye, sir.”
The captain turned to Lawton. “Suppose we call it a bubble. Why are we suspended like this, immovably? Your rocket leads shot up, and the plumb line dropped one hundred feet. Why should the ship itself remain stationary?”
Lawton said: “The bubble must possess sufficient internal equilibrium to keep a big, heavy body suspended at its core. In other words, we must be suspended at the hub of converging energy lines.”
“You mean we’re surrounded by an electromagnetic field?”
Lawton frowned. “Not necessarily, sir. I’m simply pointing out that there must be an energy tug of some sort involved. Otherwise the ship would be resting on the inner surface of the bubble.”
Forrester nodded grimly. “We should be thankful, I suppose, that we can move about inside the ship. Dave, do you think a man could descend to the inner surface?”
“I’ve no doubt that a man could, sir. Shall I let myself down?”
“Absolutely not. Damn it, Dave, I need your energies inside the ship. I could wish for a less impulsive first officer, but a man in my predicament can’t be choosy.”
“Then what are your orders, sir?”
“Orders? Do I have to order you to think? Is working something out for yourself such a strain? We’re drifting straight toward the Atlantic Ocean. What do you propose to do about that?”
“I expect I’ll have to do my best, sir.”
Lawton’s “best” conflicted dynamically with the captain’s orders. Ten minutes later he was descending, hand over hand, on a swaying emergency ladder.
“Tough-fibered Davie goes down to look around,” he grumbled.
He was conscious that he was flirting with danger. The air outside was breathable, but would the diffuse, unorthodox gases injure his lungs? He didn’t know, couldn’t be sure. But he had to admit that he felt all right so far. He was seventy feet below the ship and not at all dizzy. When he looked down he could see the purple domed summits of mountains between gaps in the fleecy cloud blanket.
He couldn’t see the Atlantic Ocean—yet. He descended the last thirty feet with mounting confidence. At the end of the ladder he braced himself and let go.
He fell about six feet, landing on his rump on a spongy surface that bounced him back and forth. He was vaguely incredulous when he found himself sitting in the sky staring through his spread legs at clouds and mountains.
He took a deep breath. It struck him that the sensation of falling could be present without movement downward through space. He
