The act was significant.
Whatever happened to them, would happen to both in equal measure. It was a gesture which needed no words. If they were slain when their friends—if their theory was correct—finally saw the space ship, they would die together. If by some miracle they were hurled into outer space and lived to use their parachutes—well, the discomfort was a small price to pay to stay together.
Now they devoted all their attention to their own situation. Four planes still spun warily above the space ship. Wang Li was patently trying with all his might to get all four of them before the Jeter-Eyer plane, by shattering the rind, disclosed the inner core to the bombs of the remaining planes.
"Lucian!" said the fingers of Eyer. "Can you tell whether anything is happening to the rind?"
Jeter hesitated for a long time. There was a distinct and almost nauseating vibration throughout all the space ship. And was there not something happening to the rind over a wide area, directly above the Jeter-Eyer plane?
They could fancy the snapping of ice on a forest lake in mid-winter.
They couldn't hear, in their suits. They could only feel. But all at once the outer rind, above their plane, vanished. At the same instant the plane itself, propeller still spinning, rose swiftly up through the hole in the rind. The air inside the globe was going out in a great rush.
The partners looked at each other. At that moment the four planes swooped over the space ship....
Jeter and Eyer knew that the inner globe had at last become visible, for from the bellies of the four planes dropped bomb after bomb. They fell into the great aperture. Jeter and Eyer flung themselves flat. But the bombs had worked sufficient havoc. They had removed all protection from the low-pressure stratosphere. The air inside the space ship went out with a rush. Jeter and Eyer, hearing nothing, though they knew that the explosions must have been cataclysmic, were picked up and whirled toward that opening, like chips spun toward the heart of a whirlpool.