The rush of escaping atmosphere picked the Lensman up as though he had been a straw—hurled him out——
This was the first time that Kinnison had ever been really badly wounded, and it made him sick. But, sick and numb, senses reeling at the shock to his slug-torn body, his right hand flashed to the external controller of his neutralizer. For he was falling inert. It was only ten or fifteen meters to the bottom, as he remembered it. He had mighty little time to waste if he were not to land inert. He snapped the controller. Nothing happened. Something had been shot away. His driver, too, was dead. Snapping the sleeve of his armor into its clamps he began to withdraw his arm in order to operate the internal controls, but he ran out of time. He crashed, on the top of a subsiding pile of masonry which had preceded him, but which had not yet attained a state of equilibrium, underneath a shower of similar material which rebounded from his armor in a boiler-shop clangor of noise.
Well it was that that heap of masonry had not yet had time to settle into form, for in some slight measure it acted as a cushion to break the Lensman's fall. But an inert fall of forty feet, even cushioned by rocks, is in no sense a light one. Kinnison crashed. It seemed as though a thousand pile drivers struck him at once. Surges of almost unbearable agony swept over him, as bones snapped and bruised flesh gave way. He knew dimly that a merciful tide of oblivion was reaching up to engulf his shrieking, suffering mind.
But, foggily at first in the stunned confusion of his entire being, something stirred, that unknown and unknowable something, that indefinable ultimate quality that had made him worthy of the Lens he wore. He lived, and while a Lensman lived he did not quit. To quit was to die then and there, since he was losing air fast. He had plastic in his kit, of course, and the holes were small. He must plug those leaks, and plug them quick.
His left arm, he found, he could not move at all. It must be smashed pretty badly. Every shallow breath was a searing pain. That meant a rib or two gone out. Luckily, however, he was not breathing blood; therefore, his lungs must still be intact. He could move his right arm, although it seemed like a lump of clay or a limb belonging to some one else.
But, mustering all his power of will, he made it move. He dragged it out of the armor's clamped sleeve, forced the leaden hand to slide through the welter of blood that seemed almost to fill the bulge of his armor. He found his kit box, and, after an eternity of pain-racked time, he compelled his sluggish hand to open it and to take out the plastic.