After he slammed the hatch and dogged it, he leaned against the thick metal for a long while. The clack-clack overhead was somewhat pacified. But it wouldn't remain that way long. He quelled the fear sensations that were racing through him and tried to think.
How long? How long had it been since Jim left? He was three jumps away a few hours ago—or was it longer than that?—and he still had seven to go or was it six? Had it been just a few hours ago, or was it days? He had slept some—twice, he believed—since then. But for how long? And if the tow ships did make it back in time, would they have spare rods?
He gave it up as a hopeless speculation and started back up the passageway, shoulders drooping.
Karoom!
The new sound reverberated through the agonized vessel and the bulkheads of the passageway shuddered in fanatic sympathy with it.
The deck shifted crazily beneath his feet and a port beam—the bulkhead and the rest of the ship following it—swung over to crash into his shoulder.
A stabbing pain shot up his arm as he slid down the tilting wall and landed in the right angle between the deck and the bulkhead.
Massaging the torn ligament in his arm, he sat up and swayed dizzily in resonance with the pendulum-like motion of the vessel. Then he struggled to his feet and stood upright—one foot planted at an angle against the deck and the other against the port bulkhead. Overhead was the corresponding juncture made by the ceiling plate and the starboard bulkhead.
Nausea welled as he tried to adjust to the new, perverted up and down references. He didn't have to wonder what had happened. The starboard gray coil that ran under the overheated converter, he knew, had finally shorted out. The port coil was still operating normally. He considered turning it off, but conceded it was better to struggle around in an apparently listing ship than to be wracked by the nausea of weightlessness.
Straddling the deck and port bulkhead, he waddled back to the hatchway, threw a leg over its edge and lifted himself into the control compartment, sliding down the floor to the port side. He worked his way to the control seat, readjusted its tilt and crawled in it.