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The largest of the Sandra's cabins was transformed under the direction of Leithgow into a hospital bay, and the five cots bearing the prostrate, unconscious bodies of the patients put there. Though hastily improvised, this hospital was complete, as fully equipped and nearly as efficient as if it were on Earth and not in the belly of a space-ship.
One could imagine falling forty-two thousand miles, where one couldn't imagine falling a light-year. Calhoun was walking on the steel plates of a gigantic space-ship which floated among dozens of its fellows, all seeming derelicts and seemingly abandoned. He was able to walk on the nearest because of magnetic-soled shoes.
You can guess what happened!" "Tell me," said Calhoun. "We armed ships in a hurry," admitted the doctor, "We chased their space-ship back to Dara. We hung in space off the planet. We told them we'd blast their world from pole to pole if they ever dared take to space again. We made them destroy their one ship, and we watched on visionscreens as it was done." "But you gave them food?"
And during all this time the forces of the seven sectors had been concentrating. The pilot vessels, with their flaming red screens, each followed by a cone of space-ships, drew closer and closer together, approaching the Fearless the British super-dreadnaught which was to be the flagship of the Fleet the mightiest and heaviest space-ship which had yet lifted her stupendous mass into the ether.
The Liberty had started out with a skeleton crew of shipyard workers and no stores or arms. The ranks were now filled with volunteers from Deccan and elsewhere, and its storage-rooms fairly bulged with foodstuffs. Bors, however, really relaxed only once. That was when he saw the filled racks of missiles. On Deccan they'd been lavish in their gifts to the rebel space-ship.
This ship is none too big, is considerable slower than the big space-ship, and we're a long ways from home. Another bad thing is the food question. The boat is well stocked according to Nevian ideas, but it's pretty foul stuff for us to eat. However, it's nourishing, and we'll have to eat it, since we can't carry enough of our own supplies to the boat to last long.
Costigan shut off his beam, and, with not the slightest softening of one hard lineament, stared around the air-room; making sure that no serious damage had been done to the vital machinery of the air-purifier the very lungs of the great space-ship. Dismounting the Standish, he lugged it back up to the main saloon, replaced it in its safe and again set the combination lock.
Dangerous beasts have to be relatively rare, or they will not have enough to eat, when they will thin out until they are relatively rare and do have enough to eat. So the three explorers moved safely, though their boldness was that of ignorance, below gigantic trees nearly as tall as the space-ship standing on end.
And where the great space-ship had rested there was for an instant nothing. Exactly nothing a vacuum. Vessel, falsework, rollers, trucks, the enormous steel I-beams of the tracks, even the deep-set concrete piers and foundations and a vast hemisphere of the solid ground; all had disappeared utterly and instantaneously.
The pilot, stationed immediately below the conical prow of the space-ship, peered intently through the thick windows of crystal-clear metal which afforded unobstructed vision in every direction except vertically upward and behind him. His four huge and contractile eyes were active, each operating independently in sending its own message to his peculiar but capable brain.
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