g for. I pull myself down and turn off the antigrav; then I
just shake for a bit.

The sound was--

This is stupid, with everything torn to pieces in this ship there is
no wonder if bits shake loose and drop around--

But it was not a metallic noise, it was a kind of soft dragging, very
soft, that ended in a little thump.

Like a--

Like a loose piece of plastic dislodged from its angle of rest and
slithering down, pull yourself together Lizzie Lee.

I look through the door into the other half of this level. Shambles.
Smashed machinery every which way, blocking the door, blocking
everything. No way through at all.

Suddenly I remember the tools. Mr. Yardo loaded the fish-boat with all
it would take. I crawl back and return with a fifteen inch expanding
beam-lever, and overuse it; the jammed trap door does not slide back
in its grooves but flips right out of them, bent double; it flies off
into the dark and clangs its way to rest.

I am halfway through the opening when I hear the sound again. A soft
slithering; a faint defeated thump.

I freeze where I am, and then I hear the sigh; a long, long weary
sound, almost musical.

An air leak somewhere in the hull and wind or waves altering the air
pressure below.

All the same I do not seem able to come any farther through this door.

Light might help; I turn the beam up and play it cautiously around.
This is the last compartment, right in the nose; a sawn-off
cone-shape. No breaks here, though the hull is buckled to my left and
the "floor"--the partition, horizontal when the ship is in the normal
operating position, which holds my trap door--is torn up; some large
heavy object was welded to a thin surface skin which has ripped away
leaving jagged edges and a pattern of girders below.

There is no dust here; it has all been sucked out when the ship was
open to space; nothing to show the beam except the sliding yellow
ellipse where it touches the wall. It glides and turns, spiraling
down, deformed every so often where it crosses a projection or a dent,
till it halts suddenly on a spoked disk, four feet across and standing
nearly eighteen inches out from the wall. The antigrav.

I never saw one this size, it is like the little personal affairs as a
giant is like a pigmy, not only bigger but a bit different in
proportion. I can see an Andite cartridge fastened among the spokes.

The fuse is a "sympathizer" but it is probably somewhere close. The
ellipse moves