ir
death.

After a time there came the sudden crackling of the air-tight bulkhead
which separated the salon from the forward sections. Quirl knew what
this meant. The pirates had succeeded in breaching a hole through the
ship's skin, and the air of the forward section had rushed into space.
It was sickening to think of those brave men up there caught in the
suddenly formed vacuum. Long before the bulkhead had ceased crackling
he knew they were dead, and that the pirate crew had entered, wearing
vacuum suits, and was even then replenishing the air so the passengers
could be taken alive.

* * * * *

They had been in the prison hold of the pirate ship for five days,
terrestrial time. This was nothing like the spacious quarters they had
occupied before. A cross-section of their prison would have looked
like a wedge with a quarter circle for its blunt end. The curved wall
of the great cylindrical projectile, nearly a hundred feet in
diameter, was their floor, on which they could walk like flies on the
inside of a wheel rim. The walls of the room, on two sides, converged
toward the top, until they joined the sides of a well-like tunnel that
ran from the nose of the ship to its tail, where the rocket nozzles
were. A door pierced the tunnel side, and under this door was a metal
platform, from which one could either climb into the passage or down a
ladder into the hold. A pirate guard held this platform, from where he
could peer over the top of a curtain which gave scant privacy to the
men and women prisoners on either side of it.

On the floor-plates, without even the meager comfort of the dried
Martian weeds that had been given to the women, sat or lay the men.
They showed their dejection, their faces covered with new growths of
beard, their clothes crumpled and torn. The only furniture consisted
of a long, light metal table on the women's side, securely bolted to
the floor. The prisoners were obliged to stand at this when eating
their meals. The whole cheerless scene was coldly illuminated by a
single light-emanating disk just under the guard's platform.

Steps echoed hollowly metallic from above. Quirl wondered if it was
already time for the galley boy to bring the immense bowl of hot stew
for the noon meal.

* * * * *

It was not. It was Moby Gore, the huge and overbearing first mate of
the pirates on his daily mission of inspection and prisoner baiting.