“Say,” Doctor Manning’s booming voice cut in over the inter-com, “how much longer will you two be up there? We’re getting hungry.”
Dave smiled and spoke into the inter-com. “A few hours yet. You fellows go ahead and eat. We’ll have a bite up here.”
“Can’t you come down for a few minutes?” Doctor Manning complained.
“Impossible,” Dave answered. “Go on and eat.”
“Well, all right, if you say so.”
The speaker went dead.
“We’ve got to stay up here,” Dave explained. “There’s no telling what might happen.”
They slumped against the aluminum wall of the ship again, exhausted, waiting for the worst.
After five hours of top-speed travel, it happened.
At first, it was just a low rumble in the generator. Dave jumped to his feet immediately. He rushed to the inter-com and threw the switch. “Attention, down there. Attention! There’s going to be trouble. Adjust your safety belts immediately.”
Doctor Manning’s voice boomed into the control room. “Are you kidding us, Dave?”
The rumble in the generator grew louder. Spasmodically, the motor attached to the twin rotors began to cough.
“That’s an order,” Dave barked. “Adjust your safety belts at once!”
“Trouble, Dave?” Doctor Manning asked.
“Serious trouble,” Dave snapped. “Stand by for a crash landing, Doc.”
“Need any help up there?”
“Nope. Just adjust those safety belts and brace your…”
Suddenly, without warning, the machine began to tremble violently.
“Stand by,” Dave barked into the speaker.
The floor began to pitch beneath Neil’s feet. And then the machine began to spin crazily, round and round, over and over, like a mad plastic and aluminum pinwheel in the sky. Neil was smashed into the wail, his shoulder filling instantly with pain.
“We’re losing altitude,” Dave shouted above the roar of the throbbing generator and motor. He was lifted from his feet and sent scuttling across the floor. He bounced against the far wall, bounced off again, and was lifted into the air to crash with a sickening thud beside Neil. Neil staggered to his feet, clutching one of the wall lockers for support. The machine gave a final, frightening shudder and dropped like a stone. Neil’s fingers were pried loose from the wall locker, and he was flung backward against the instrument panel.
Wave after wave of grayness folded in on Neil, engulfing him, growing grayer and grayer, and then black, and blacker, and then there was nothing but the aching throb in his shoulder and the terrible sound that burst in his ears.
The machine seemed to erupt into a thousand living skyrockets that screamed in Neil’s head, shooting live sparks into every corner of his mind.
And above the scream of the skyrockets, there was a human scream that penetrated the darkness.
Beneath it all, like a tiny insistent hammer that pounded at his skull, Neil knew the machine had crashed, and before he dropped off into unconsciousness, he wondered vaguely where they were-and in what time.
There was a lapping noise, like the sound of a stiff brush swishing against a starched shirt. Dimly, it reached into Neil’s mind, poked there insistently. His eyelids flickered, closed again. The swishing was somewhere above his head, but there was a pain in his right shoulder and he didn’t want to move, didn’t want to stir.
If only it weren’t for the swishing in his ears!
His lids struggled open, and a beam of sunlight burst in his eyes, causing him to squint.
He struggled to his knees and looked around him.
Something was wrong; something was all wrong.
The floor wasn’t straight any more. It curved gently like the rockers on a hobbyhorse. And there were portholes on the floor, and through the portholes there was a green swirling underfoot. Neil shook his head and blinked his eyes.
The instrument panel, which should have been against one of the aluminum, cylindrical walls of the control room, was now on the ceiling, directly overhead.
The hatchway from which the aluminum ladder led to the bubble below was now halfway up the wall on Neil’s right instead of on the floor, where it should have been. And the wall was flat, rather than slightly curved.
And then, like the first feeble rays of dawn, Neil understood what the trouble was. He sighed in relief as he realized the machine was lying on its side. He was actually standing on one of the walls. And now, instead of one bubble being below and the other above the control room, one bubble would be to the right and the other to the left of it.
Suddenly Neil remembered Dave!
Frantically, his eyes widened as he scanned the machine quickly. His eyes stopped on what appeared to be a crumpled bundle of rags lying in a corner of the machine.
“Dave!” he shouted, running across the room as fast as he could on the curved floor. “Dave!”