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Updated: June 18, 2025
With the ventilating fans stilled, the air was turning fetid. Chilling. And thinning, with escaping pressure, rarefying so that I could feel the grasp of it in my lungs and the pin-pricks in my cheeks. We started off. Four of us, still alive in this silent ship of death. My blurred thoughts tried to cope with it all. Venza here.
She sat back, silently watching my busy activities: the calculations of the shifting conditions of gravity, pressures, temperatures; a checking of the instruments on the board before me. Mechanical routine. My mind went to Venza, back there on the asteroid. The wandering little world was already shrinking to a convex surface beneath us. Venza, with her last unknown play, gone to failure.
This was a ruse to get a word with me. I stood before the terrified woman while the child clung to my legs. I said gently, "Don't be so frightened. Dr. Frank will take care of you. There is no danger; you will be safer on the asteroid than here on the ship." I leaned down and touched her shoulder. "There is no danger." I was between Venza and the open cabin.
Snap and I lifted the pile of Moon equipment to which she referred. We located four suits and helmets and the mechanisms to operate them. "More are in the chart room," Anita said. But we needed no others. I robed Anita and showed her the mechanisms. Snap was helping Venza. We were all stiff from the cold; but within the suits and their pulsing currents, the blessed warmth came again.
But my fancy pictured this last sight of them, Dr. Frank, Venza, Shac and Dud Ardley. They were gone. There were left only Snap, Anita and myself. I was mechanically ringing us away. I heard my sirens sounding down below, with the answering clangs here in the turret.
She'd made quite a hit on the Great White Way. She came up the incline with the carrier ahead of her. Gazing up, she saw Dr. Frank and me at the turret window, smiled and waved her white arm in greeting. Dr. Frank laughed. "By the gods of the airways, there's Alta Venza! You saw that look, Gregg? That was for me, not you." "Reasonable enough," I retorted.
They'll kill themselves, or kill us or smash something!" We followed the man into the building's broad central corridor. Anita and Venza were riding a midget platform! Anita, in her boyish black garb; Venza, with a flowing white Venus-robe. They lay on the tiny six foot long oblong of metal, one manipulating its side shields, the other at the controls.
"There's Anita and George Prince." They came to the corner of the deck, but turned back. Venza caught my look. And understood it. "You do love Anita Prince, Gregg?" Venza was smiling. "I wish you.... I wish some man handsome as you would gaze after me like that." She turned solemn. "You may be interested to know, she loves you. I could see it. I knew it when I mentioned you to her this morning."
A last minute change made Grantline order six of his men to remain to guard the buildings. The instruments, the Erentz system, all the appliances had to be attended. It left four platforms, each with three men Grantline at the controls of one of them. And upon two of the others, Venza rode with Snap and I with Anita. We crouched in the shadows outside the port.
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