more-and fell flat on his face as the drill came loose.
In the same instant, the cabin reverberated with a screaming roar, and a gale started all the loose papers fluttering like autumn leaves. A mist of condensation formed as the air, chilled by its sudden expansion, dumped its moisture in a thick fog. When Pat turned over on his back, conscious at last of what had happened, he was almost blinded by the mist around him.
That scream meant only one thing to a trained spaceman, and his automatic reactions had taken over now. He must find some flat object that could be slid over the hole; anything would do, if it was fairly strong.
He looked wildly around him in the crimson fog, which was already thinning as it was sucked into space. The noise was deafening; it seemed incredible that so small a pipe could make such a scream.
Staggering over his unconscious companions, clawing his way from seat to seat, he had almost abandoned hope when he saw the answer to his prayer. There lay a thick volume, open face downward on the floor where it had been dropped. Not the right way to treat books, he thought, but he was glad that someone had been careless. He might never have seen it otherwise.
When he reached the shrieking orifice that was sucking the life out of the cruiser, the book was literally torn from his hands and flattened against the end of the pipe. The sound died instantly, as did the gale. For a moment Pat stood swaying like a drunken man; then he quietly folded at the knees and pitched to the floor.
Chapter 22
The really unforgettable moments of TV are those which no one expects, and for which neither cameras nor commentators are prepared. For the last thirty minutes, the raft had been the site of feverish but controlled activity - then, without warning, it had erupted.
Impossible though that was, it seemed as if a geyser had spouted from the Sea of Thirst. Automatically, Jules tracked that ascending column of mist as it drove toward the stars (they were visible now; the director had asked for them). As it rose, it expanded like some strange, attenuated plant - or like a thinner, feebler version of the mushroom cloud that had terrorized two generations of mankind.
It lasted only for a few seconds, but in that time it held unknown millions frozen in front of their screens, wondering how a waterspout could possibly have reared itself from this arid sea. Then it collapsed and died, still in the same uncanny silence in which it had been born.
To the men on the raft that geyser of moisture-laden air was equally silent, but they felt its vibration as they struggled to get the last coupling into place. They would have managed, sooner or later, even if Pat had not cut off the flow, for the forces involved were quite trivial. But their "later" might have been too late. Perhaps, indeed, it already was.. ..
"Calling Selene! Calling Selene!" shouted Lawrence. "Can you hear me?"
There was no reply. The cruiser's transmitter was not operating; he could not even hear the sounds her mike should be picking up inside the cabin.
"Connections ready, sir," said Coleman. "Shall I turn on the oxygen generator?"
It won't do any good, thought Lawrence, if Harris has managed to screw that damned bit back into place. I can only hope he's merely stuffed something into the end of the tube, and that we can blow it out.
"O. K." he said. "Let her go - all the pressure you can get."
With a sudden bang, the battered copy of The Orange and the Apple was blasted away from the pipe to which it had been vacuum-clamped. Out of the open orifice gushed an inverted fountain of gas, so cold that its outline was visible in ghostly swirls of condensing water vapor.
For several minutes the oxygen geyser roared without producing any effect. Then Pat Harris slowly stirred, tried to get up, and was knocked back to the ground by the concentrated jet. It was not a particularly powerful jet, but it was stronger than he was in his present state.
He lay with the icy blast playing across his face, enjoying its refreshing coolness almost as much as its breathability. In a few seconds he was completely alert - though he had a splitting headache - and aware of all that had happened in the last half-hour.
He nearly fainted again when he remembered unscrewing the bit,