this way."

Or was it? I answered Snap, "Yes, I think so."

The ship suddenly seemed a stranger to me. So cold. So vibrationless.
Broken lights. These slanting, wrecked corridors. With the ventilating
fans stilled, the air was turning fetid. Chilling. And thinning, with
escaping pressure, rarifying so that I could feel the grasp of it in my
lungs and the pin-pricks of my burning 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. I recalled how
she had bade me create a diversion when the women passengers were
landing on the asteroid. She had carried out her purpose! In the
confusion she had not gone ashore. A stowaway here. She had secured the
cloak. Prowling, to try and help us, she had come upon Hahn. Had seized
his ray-cylinder and struck him down, and been herself knocked
unconscious by his dying lunge, which also had broken the tubes and
wrecked the _Planetara_. And Venza, unconscious, had been lying here
with the mechanism of her cloak still operating, so that we did not see
her when we came and found why Hahn did not answer my signals.

"It's here, Gregg."

Snap and I lifted the pile of Moon equipment. 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.

"Yes. I understand."

* * * * *

Snap was helping Venza. We were all stiff from the cold; but within the
suits and their pulsing currents, the blessed warmth came again.

The helmets had admission ports through which food and drink could be
taken. I stood with my helmet ready. Anita, Venza and Snap were bloated
and grotesque beside me. We had found food and water here, assembled in
portable cases which the brigands had prepared. Snap lifted them, and
signed to me he was ready.

My helmet shut out all sounds save my own breathing, my pounding heart,
and the murmur of the mechanism. The blessed warmth and pure air were
good.

We reached the hull port-locks. They operated! We went through in the
light of the head-lamps over our foreheads.

I closed the locks after us. An instinct to keep the air in the ship for
the other trapped humans lying there.

We slid down the sloping side of the _Planetara_. We were unweighted,
irrationally agile with the slight gravity. I fell a dozen feet and
landed with barel