The wave broke.

"_Dasinger! What's happened?_"

"Nothing," Dasinger said, his voice raw. He pulled the empty needle out
of his arm, dropped it. "But something nearly did! The kwil I took
wasn't enough. I was standing here waiting to let that damned machine
swamp me when you spoke."

"You should have heard what you sounded like over the communicator! I
thought you were ..." her voice stopped for an instant, began again.
"Anyway," she said briskly, "you're loaded with kwil now, I hope?"

"More than I should be, probably." Dasinger rubbed both hands slowly
down along his face. "Well, it couldn't be helped. That was pretty
close, I guess! I don't even remember getting the hypo out of the case."

He looked back up at the looming bow of the Antares, unbeautiful enough
but prosaically devoid of menace and mystery now, though the pulsing
beat still came from there. A mechanical obstacle and nothing else. "I'm
going on in now."

From the darkness within the lock came the smell of stagnant water, of
old decay. The mold that proliferated over the ramp did not extend into
the wreck. But other things grew inside, pale and oily tendrils
festooning the walls. Dasinger removed his night glasses, brought out a
pencil light, let the beam fan out, and moved through the lock.

The crash which had crumpled the ship's lower shell had thrust up the
flooring of the lock compartment, turned it into what was nearly level
footing now. On the right, a twenty-foot black gap showed between the
ragged edge of the deck and the far bulkhead from which it had been
torn. The oily plant life spread over the edges of the flooring and on
down into the flooded lower sections of the Antares. The pulse of
Hovig's generator came from above and the left where a passage slanted
steeply up into the ship's nose. Dasinger turned towards the passage,
began clambering up.

* * * * *

There was no guesswork involved in determining which of the doors along
the passage hid the machine in what, if Graylock's story was correct,
had been Hovig's personal stateroom. As Dasinger approached that point,
it was like climbing into silent thunder. The door was locked, and
though the walls beside it were warped and cracked, the cracks were too
narrow to permit entry. Dasinger dug out a tool which had once been the
prized property of one of Orado's more eminent safecrackers, and went to
work on the lock. A minute or two later he forced the