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The alarm bells clanged once; the big red lights flashed once; the sirens barely started to growl, then quit. The whole vast fabric of the ship trembled and shuddered and shook as though it were being mauled by a thousand impossibly gigantic hammers. Deston did not know and never did find out whether it was his captain or an automatic that touched off the alarm.
"I know what you two men must of necessity be. Therefore I can say without reservation that none of you need feel any apprehension whatever." Deston was about to say something, but Barbara forestalled him. "Well, we can think about it, anyway, and talk it over. But for right now, I think it's high time we all got some sleep. Don't you?"
"So just hold one gravity on eighteen dash forty-seven dash two seventy-one and I'll correct you as necessary." After setting course, and still thinking of his watch, Deston said; "But it's nonmagnetic. It never stopped before." The gray-haired man spoke. "It was never in such a field before.
Then, in Lifecraft Two as far away from the "business district" as they could get the human bodies were grounded and Deston started the reel. The wire ran out and ran and ran and ran. The full twenty-five miles were paid out, and still nothing happened. Then, very slowly, Deston let the big ship move straight downward. Until, finally, it happened.
Newman's eyes raked Bernice's five-feet-eight of scantily-clad sheer beauty from ankles to coiffure. "If you're too crowded I know a lifecraft carries only fifty people go yourself." "As a crew-chief, you know the law." Deston spoke quietly too quietly, as the other man should have known. "I am in command." "You ain't in command of me, pretty boy!" Newman sneered.
At the sixth trial nothing apparently happened; whereupon the wire was drawn in and a two-hundred-pound mass of steel was lowered until it was in firm and quiescent contact with the solid rock of the planet. "Now you may try your radio," Adams said. Deston flipped a switch and spoke, quietly but clearly, into a microphone. "Procyon One to Control Six. Flight Eight Four Nine.
He barely took time out to eat and to sleep. Nor did either Deston or Jones ask him what he was doing. Both knew that it would take five years of advanced study before either of them could understand the simplest material on the doctor's tapes. The tremendous engines of the Procyon were again putting out their wonted torrents of power.
Another voice, crisp and authoritative, came in; growing louder as its source approached the distant pickup. "Or somebody will rot in jail for a hundred years." "Procyon One to Control Six," Deston said again. His voice was not quite steady this time; both girls were crying openly and joyfully. "How do you read me, Frenchy old horse?"
Barbara's hand-to-hand engagement took about one second longer. Moose Mordan was big and strong; and, for such a big man, was fairly fast physically. If he had had time to get his muscles ready, he might have had a chance. His thought processes, however, were lamentably slow; and Barbara Warner Deston was almost as fast physically as she was mentally.
Of what use is it to pit such puny and trivial things as facts against rock-ribbed, iron-bound, entrenched AUTHORITY? The five, however, knew; and Deston and Jones had several long and highly unsatisfactory discussions; at first with Adams, and later between themselves.
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