ght before my eyes.

Ten feet away down the deck was the opened door of the pressure
chamber. A bloated figure came into my dreamlike vista, moving for the
pressure door. It turned, saw me, came leaping and bent over me. I saw
behind the vizor that it was Grantline. His bloated, gloved hands
helped me don my suit.

He helped me with my helmet. The metal tip on Grantline's gloved hand
touched the contact-plate on my shoulder. His voice sounded from the
tiny audiphone grid within my helmet. "Gregg! Thank God I found you!
All right?"

"Yes." My head was clearing.

"I've got the chamber ready. We're the last, Gregg."

I gripped his shoulder. "You're sure there's nobody else?"

"No. I've been everywhere I could reach. The central bulkheads are
almost gone."

He pushed me into the pressure chamber. There was hardly need to close
the door after us. I stood gripping him as he opened the small outer
slides. The abyss was at our feet; the outgoing wind tore at us like a
gale, so that we stood gripping the casements.

"Thank God you've got a power-suit, Gregg. So have I. We must keep
together."

"Yes."

I could feel the floor grid of the chamber shuddering beneath my feet.
The _Cometara_ was cracking, bursting outward throughout her length;
at any instant she might collapse.

For a moment we stood poised. Beneath us, here at the brink were
millions upon millions of miles of emptiness, the remote, unfathomable
void. Blazing worlds down there in the black darkness.

"Good-by, Gregg. It may be the end for us."

"Good luck, Johnny."

His bloated figure dropped away from me. I waited just an instant, and
then I dove into space.

For a moment there was a chaos of strangeness, the wrench to my sense
of the transition. I had been the inhabitant of a little world, the
_Cometara_, with a gravity beneath my feet. Now, in a breath, I had no
world to inhabit. I was alone in space. No gravity; nothing solid to
touch; emptiness.

I was in a world to myself, and the abnormality of it brought a mental
shock. But in a moment the adjustment came. I passed the transition,
the sense of falling.

The firmament steadied and my senses cleared. My dive from the
_Cometara_ carried me in a slow arc some three hundred feet away.
There had been a sense of falling, but no actual fall. My velocity was
retarded, with the mass of the _Cometara_ pulling at me. I went like a
toy boat in water shoved by a child, quickly slowing. In a few
mom