ing of running steps.
Panic among the crew was spreading over the ship. A chaos below deck.

I pulled at the emergency switch again. Dead....

"Snap, we must get down. The signals."

Coniston's voice came like a scream from the grid. "Hahn is dead. The
controls are broken!"

I shouted, "Miko, hold Anita! Come on, Snap!"

We clung to the ladders. Snap was behind me. "Careful, Gregg! Good
God!"

This dizzying whirl. I tried not to look. The deck under me was now a
blurred kaleidoscope of swinging patches of moonlight and shadow.

We reached the deck. It seemed that from the turret Anita's voice
followed us. "Be careful!"

Once inside the ship, our senses steadied. With the rotating, reeling
heavens shut out, there were only the shouts and tramping steps of the
panic-stricken crew to mark that there was anything amiss. That, and a
pseudo sensation of lurching caused by the pulsing of gravity--a pull
when the Moon was beneath our hull to combine its forces with our
magnetizers; a lightening, when it was overhead. A throbbing, pendulum
lurch!

We ran down to the corridor incline. A white-faced member of the crew
came running up.

"What's happened, Haljan? What's happened?"

"We're falling!" I gripped him. "Get below. Come with us."

But he jerked away from me. "Falling?"

A steward came running. "Falling? My God!"

Snap swung at them. "Get ahead of us! The manual controls--our only
chance--we need all you men at the compressor pumps!"

But it was instinct to try and get on deck, as though here below we
were rats caught in a trap. The men tore away from us and ran. Their
shouts of panic resounded through the dim, blue lit corridors.

Coniston came lurching from the control room. "I say--falling! Haljan,
my God, look!"

Hahn was sprawled at the gravity plate switchboard. Sprawled, head
down. Dead. Killed? Or a suicide?

I bent over him. His hands gripped the main switch. He had ripped it
loose. And his left hand had reached and broken the fragile line of
tubes that intensified the current of the pneumatic plate-shifters. A
suicide? With his last frenzy, determined to kill us all? Why?

Then I saw that Hahn had been killed! Not a suicide! In his hand he
gripped a small segment of black fabric, a piece torn from an
invisible cloak!

Snap was rigging the hand compressors. If he could get the pressure
back in the tanks....

I swung on Coniston. "You armed?"

"Yes." He was white-faced and confused, but