other timepiece available. When he came to, he found himself, along with Mark Brandon, who shared his room, and Mike Shea, a member of the crew, sole occupants of all that was left of the Silver Queen. This remnant was now careening in an orbit about Vesta. At present, things were fairly comfortable. There was a food supply that would last a week. Likewise there was a regional Gravitator under the room that kept them at normal weight and continue to do so for an indefinite time, certainly for longer than the air would last. The lighting system was less satisfactory but had held on so far.
There was no doubt, however, where the joker in the pack lay. Three days' air! Not that there weren't other disheartening features. There was no heating system-though it would take a long time for the ship to radiate enough heat into the vacuum of space to render them too uncomfortable. Far more important was the fact that their part of the ship had neither a means of communication nor a propulsive mechanism. Moore sighed. One fuel jet in working order would fix everything, for one blast in the right direction would send them safely to Vesta.
The crease between his eyes deepened. What was to be done? They had but one spacesuit among them, one heat ray, and one detonator. That was the sum total of space appliances after a thorough search of the accessible parts of the ship. A pretty hopeless mess, that.
Moore shrugged, rose, and drew himself a glass of water. He swallowed it mechanically, still deep in thought, when an idea struck him. He glanced curiously at the empty cup in his hand.
'Say, Mike,' he said, 'what kind of water supply have we? Funny that I never thought of that before.'
Mike's eyes opened to their fullest extent in an expression of ludicrous surprise. 'Didn't you know, boss?'
'Know what!' asked Moore impatiently.
'We've got all the water there was.' He waved his hand in an all-inclusive gesture. He paused, but as Moore's expression showed nothing but total mystification, he elaborated, 'Don't you see? We've got the main tank, the place where all the water for the whole ship was stored.' He pointed to one of the walls.
'Do you mean to say that there's a tank full of water adjoining us?'
Mike nodded vigorously, 'Yep! Cubic vat a hundred feet each way. And she's three-quarters full.'
Moore was astonished. 'Seven hundredand fifty thousand cubic feetof water.'Then suddenly:'Why hasn't it run out through the broken pipes?'
'It only has one main outlet, which runs down the corridor just outside this room. I was fixing that main when the asteroid hit and had to shut it off. After I came to I opened the pipe leading to our faucet, but that's the only outlet open now.'
'Oh.' Moore had a curious feeling way down deep inside. An idea had half-formed in his brain, but for the life of him he could not drag it into the light of day. He knew only that there was something in what he had just heard that had some important meaning but he just could not place his finger on it.
Brandon, meanwhile, had been listening to Shea in silence, and now he emitted a short, humorless laugh.
'Fate seems to be having its fill of fun with us, I see. First, it puts us within arm's reach of a place of safety and then sees to it that we have no way of getting there.
'Then she provides us with a week's food, three days' air, and a year's supply of water. A year's supply, do you hear me? Enough water to drink and to gargle and to wash and to take baths in and-and to do anything else we want. Water-damn the water!'
'Oh, take a less serious view, Mark,' said Moore in an attempt to break the younger man's melancholy.
'Pretend we're a satellite of Vesta-which we are. We have our own period of revolution and of rotation.
We have an equator and an axis. Our "north pole" is located somewhere toward the top of the porthole, pointing toward Vesta, and our "south" sticks out away from Vesta through the water tank somewhere. Well, as a satellite, we have an atmosphere, and now, you see, we have a newly discovered ocean.
'And seriously, we're not so badly off. For the three days our atmosphere will last, we can eat double rations and drink ourselves soggy. Hell, we have water enough to throw away-'