"Hey!" yelled Mason. "I'm—I'm floating!"
"It's the gravity generators," yelled Loring. "Corbett's pulled a fast one. We're in free fall!"
Tom lifted his feet and pushed as hard as he could against the control panel. He shot out of the chair and across the control room just as Loring fired his ray gun. There was a loud hiss as the gun was fired, and then the thud of a body against the wall, as Loring was suddenly shoved by the recoil of the charge.
Tom huddled in the upper corner of the control deck like a spider, his legs drawn up underneath him waiting for Mason to fire. But the smaller spaceman was tumbling head over heels in the center of the room. The more he exerted himself, the more helpless he became. His arms and legs splayed out in an effort to level himself, as he kept trying to fire the ray gun.
Tom saw his chance and lunged through the air again, straight at the floating spaceman. He passed him in mid-air. Mason made an attempt to grab him, but Tom wrenched his body to one side and pulled the ray gun out of the other's hand.
He flipped over and turned his attention to Loring who was more dangerous, since he was now backed up against a bulkhead waiting for Tom to present a steady target. Loring started to fire, but Tom saw him in time and shot away from the wall toward the hatch. He twisted his body completely around, and with his shoulder hunched over, fired at Loring with his ray gun. The charge hit the target and Loring became rigid, his body slowly floating above the deck. His back to the wall, braced for the recoil, Tom brought his arm around slowly and aimed at Mason. He fired, and the spaceman stiffened.
Tom smiled. Neither of the spacemen would give him any more trouble now. He pushed slightly to the left and shot over to the valve that Mason had unwittingly turned off. Tom turned it on and clung to an overhead pipe until he felt the reassuring grip of the synthetic gravity pull him to the deck. Loring and Mason, in the same positions they had been in when Tom fired, settled slowly to the deck. Tom walked over and looked at both of them. He knew they could hear him.
"For smart spacemen like you two," said Tom, "you sure forgot your basic physics. Newton's laws of motion, remember? Everything in motion tends to keep going at the same speed, unless influenced by an outside force. Firing the ray gun was the outside force that will land you right on a prison asteroid! And you'd better start praying that I can pull those fellows off that satellite, because if I don't, you'll wind up frying in the sun with us!"
He started to drag them to a locker and release them from the effects of the ray blast, but, remembering their cold-blooded condemnation of Connel and the others to death on the satellite, he decided to let them remain where they were.
He turned to the control board and flipped on the microphone. He was too far away to pick up an image on the teleceiver, but the others could hear him on the audio, if, thought Tom, they were still alive.