'm not hurt--I don't think I'm hurt." She managed to get
herself up on one elbow. "Did you think I wanted you with my dying
breath? What conceit! Not you, Handsome Haljan! I was calling Snap."

He was down to her. "We're all right, Venza. It's over. We must get
out of the ship. The air is escaping."

We gathered in the oval doorway. We fought the confusion of panic.

"The exit port is 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, rarefying so that I could feel the grasp of it in
my lungs and the pin-pricks in my 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
remembered 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 to which she referred.
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.
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 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
signaled 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 warmth and pure air were
good.

We reached the hull port locks. They operated! We went through i