For an interval Hawk Carse knew nothing. He had ceased to live, it seemed, and was soaring through Eternity. He never knew how much time passed before his numbed senses began to return and he became aware of weight and of a furious roaring in his head.
He was moving forward at blinding speed. Something kept flashing before him—a wide stream of ruddy orange light: his dazed brain could connect it with nothing he had ever known. Soon the orange stream settled into spasmodic bursts, pitch blackness filling the intervals; and when it came more slowly he saw that it was in reality the vast flaming ball of Jupiter, streaking across the line of vision as he tumbled over and over, head over heels—free in space!
The realization helped his return to alertness. As the wild tumbling motion gradually ceased, and Jupiter tended to stay more and more under his feet, he peered around through his face-plate. To one side he glimpsed two grotesque, bulky figures, one half of them limned glaringly against the blackness of space by the near-by planet's light. He saw other figures, too, spread out in a scattered fringe—figures of men in smocks, dead and bloated and white.
They were the coolies, these last, and the other two were of course Leithgow and Friday. But had they survived the outrush of air? Carse felt in his left glove for the suit's gravity control lever; found it and tentatively moved it. His acceleration slowly increased. He brought the lever part-way back. Then, into the microphone encased inside the helmet, he called:
"Leithgow! Leithgow! Can you hear me? Friday!"
The radio broadcast his words. Soon welcome answers came in Eliot Leithgow's tired voice and the negro's emphatic bass.
"Maneuver together," Carse instructed them. "We must lock arms and stay close."
Slowly, clumsily, the three monstrous figures made toward each other, and presently they were reunited in a close group. Carse pointed an arm into the face of Jupiter where there hung poised a gleaming globe of white, dappled with dark splotches.
"Satellite III," he said, "—our goal. And we'll get there without interruption now that Ku Sui, his laboratory, his coordinated brains, are destroyed.... You are very quiet, Eliot. Aren't you happy at our success?"