Page:Fantastic Universe (1956-10; vol. 8, no. 3).djvu/88

116 the effectiveness of the etheric vacuum—it was difficult to see, and he could only go over the tightly packed becquerelite cables piecemeal, an inch at a time, with the aid of his solar pencil flash. It was a full hour before he came on the small unraveled strand responsible for the missing circuit. He worked in a new wire, called up the tube for a testing, and stepped down on the floor of the lock.

Exactly what happened, he did not know. A loose spring on the Space Shute possibly, he later decided. At any rate, a foot skidded and the next moment he was down the shute and clear of the ship. He had enough presence of mind to draw down the visor of his helmet, before the valves admitted the radio-active poisons. The chemicals stored in the container of his space suit began at once to feed the oxygen tubes. In that immense void of outer space he was not conscious of any motion, but he could see Vibrant slowly lifting, although she herself was more or less anchored by her vanes. She was hovering for the immediate purpose of tabulating the depth of the layer of aerial ocean off the shores of Jupiter VIII; and charting any dark stars in the Vicinity, to pass on to the Cartography Section.

His first thought was that unless someone on the ship saw him in time to send out a rescue minnow, he had no chance of survival at all. For gravity he was dependent upon his own mass, which was just enough above zero to hold his body together for some fifteen minutes, before it inevitably began to disintegrate. Moreover, his suit was leaded only sufficiently to withstand lethal cosmic radiation for an equivalent time. Vibrant herself, and the three minnows she carried, were protected by a fifty-feet-thick envelope of vaporized lead, held by powerful magnets; but it had not been found possible to make use of this sheathing in the space suits. He had, therefore, only a few minutes to live.

He was some fifty feet below the ship, when he felt something brush his drawn-up knees. Startled, he looked down, but could see nothing. The feeling persisted, and he twisted on his face and reached out his hands. His whole body seemed to settle on an invisible bulk, that gave back a barely recognizable sensation of sponginess. Almost immediately, he had an impression of being touched here and there, as if being explored by fingers as hesitant and mystified as his own. Vibrant was still overhead and the gap had widened, and even in his stress of mind it struck him as odd that their relative vertical positions were unchanged; when, by his reckoning of the ether tides, he should have been drifting to approximate cosmic west.

A sudden stab of pain in his right foot, made him gasp. His pulses began to hammer and there came an extraordinary feeling of unsubstantiality in his blood. It