But for their space suits they would have been destroyed in the outrush of air. Out of the inner globe came men that flew, sprawled out, somersaulting up and out of apertures made by the crashing bombs. Ludicrous they looked. Blood streamed from their mouths. Their faces were set in masks of agony. There were Sitsumi and, one after another, the Three.
Then fastened together by the cuffs, the partners were being whirled over and over, out into space. Their last signals to each other had been:
"Even if you're already dead, pull the ripcord ring of your chute!"
Crushed, buffeted, they still retained consciousness. They sought through the spinning stratosphere for their rescuers. Thousands of feet below—or was it above?—they saw them. Yes, below, for they looked at the tops of the planes. Their upward flight had been dizzying. They waited until their upward flight ceased.
Then, as they started the long fall to Earth, they pulled their rings and waited for their chutes to flower above them.
Soon they were floating downward. Side by side they rode. Above them their parachutes were like two umbrellas, pressed almost too closely together.
They looked about them, seeking the space ship.
The devastation of its outer rind had been complete, for they now could see the inner globe, and it too was like—well, like merely part of an eggshell.
The doomed space ship—gyroscope still keeping the ray pointed Earthward—describing an erratic course, was shooting farther upward into the stratosphere, propelled by the ghastly ray which, now no longer controlled by Wang Li, drove the space ship madly through the outer cold.
Far below the partners many things were falling: broken furnishings of mad dreamers' stratosphere laboratories, parts of strange machines, whirling, somersaulting things that had once been men.