hen came the harsh jangle of the general alarm bell.
"Space-suits!" Carse snapped. The alarm was the signal to put them on; it was a safeguard from a possible breach in the ship's walls. Against such an emergency they had drilled often, and all over the ship the crew would be springing rapidly into space-suits hanging ready.
The space-stick automatically locked as Friday, eyes rolling, leaped with his master to the nearby locker. The shriek from aft had quickly died, the alarm bell had snapped off; but now there came a frantic rush of feet, and a man tumbled through into the control cabin, his face white, his eyes stark with horror, his breath coming in gasps and the sweat of fear on his brow.
It was Harkness.
He slammed the door tight shut behind him and stumbled to the suit locker; and as his fingers fumbled at his suit with the clumsiness of panic, he stammered:
"The cargo—the boxes of horn—it came from aft! Fungus! Planted in the horn! It's filling the ship! Got all the others and grew—grew on them! Dead already. There—look, look!"
Carse and Friday, grotesque giants in the bulky sheathings of stiff, many-plied fabric, turned as one and peered through their quartzite face shields to where the navigator's bulging eyes directed them.
It was the door between control cabin and engine room—the door he had just slammed shut. At first nothing was visible; then they saw the van of the enemy that had swarmed through the ship.