ides
went closed. The pumps filled up the chambers; the deck doors opened
again. Another batch of men....

I saw Grantline, suited but with his helmet off, dashing from one side
of the deck to the other, commanding the abandonment.

The central bulkheads seemed momentarily holding. Then little red
lights in the panel board before me showed where in the hull corridors
the doors were leaking, cracking, giving away, breaking under the
strain. The whole ribbed framework of the vessel was strained and
slued. The bulkhead sides no longer set true in the casements. Air was
whining everywhere and pulling sternward.

It was the last stand; I was aware that the alarm siren had ceased.
There was a sudden stillness, with only the shouts of the remaining
men at the exit-ports mingling with the whine of the wind and the
roaring in my head. I felt detached, far-away; my senses were reeling.

I staggered to the gauges of the Erentz system, the system whereby an
oscillating current, circling within the double-shelled walls of hull
and dome, absorbed into negative energy much of the interior pressure.
The main walls of the vessel were straining outward. The _Cometara_
could collapse at any moment. I started for the catwalk door. The
electro-telescope stood near it and I yielded to a vague desire to
gaze into the eyepiece. The instrument was still operative. I swept it
sternward.

The enemy ship had not vanished. By what strange means, I cannot say,
its velocity had been checked. A few thousand miles from us, it was
making a narrow, close-angle turn. Coming back? I thought so.

I suddenly realized my intention of having all the gravity-plates in
neutral before abandoning the ship. I seized the controls now. An
agony of fear was upon me that the shifting valves would fail. But
they did not. The plates slid haltingly, reluctantly.

I recall staggering to the catwalk. It seemed that the central
bulkhead was breaking. There were fallen figures on the deck beneath
me. I stumbled against the body of a man who had tangled himself in
the stays of the ladder rail and was hanging there.

I think I fell the last ten feet to the deck. The roaring in my ears,
the bands tightening about my chest encompassed all the world.

Then I was on my feet again, and I stumbled over another body. It was
garbed in a space-suit, with the helmet beside it. I stripped it of
the suit. I was panting, with all the world whirling in a daze,
bursting spots of li