Fifty feet away from this scene, and missing almost all of it, was Friday. From his post at the panel he kept throwing fearful looks at the nearest door, which was shuddering and clanging and threatening any moment to be wrenched off its hinges. A good thing—he was thinking—that the doors were of stout metal. When one did go he would get five or six of the soulless devils before they brought him down.
Carse waited tensely for the response—if one there was to be. His ears were throbbing in unison with the regular crash of rams on metal, but his eyes never left the convoluted mounds of intelligent matter so fantastically featured by the internal radiance of the life-giving liquid. Impossible, it seemed, that thoughts were stirring inside those gruesome things....
"Please hurry!" he said in a low voice; and Leithgow repeated desperately:
"How can we escape? Please be quick!"
Then the miracle of mechanism and matter functioned and again gave forth the cold voice of the living dead.
"It is my disposition to help you, Eliot Leithgow. On a shelf under one of the tables in this room you will find a portable heat-ray. Melt a hole in the ceiling and go out through the roof."
"Then what can we do?"
"In lockers behind the table there are space-suits, hanging ready for emergencies. Don them and leave through one of the asteroid's port-locks."
"Ask if the ports are sealed," Carse interjected instantly.
Leithgow asked the question.