"But can't I do something to help?"
"Without a suit and not knowing how to use one? You'd get burned to a cinder. Get in there—and jump!"
The oldster jumped and Deston turned to his wife. "Stay here at the port, Bobby. Wrap one leg around that lever, to anchor you. What does your telltale read? That gauge there—your radiation meter. It reads twenty, same as mine. Just pink, so we've got a minute or so. I'll roust out some passengers and toss 'em to you—you toss 'em along in there. Can do?"
She was white and trembling; she was very evidently on the verge of being violently sick; but she was far from being out of control. "Can do, sir."
"Good girl, sweetheart. Hang on one minute more and we'll have gravity and you'll be O. K."
The first five doors he tried were locked; and, since they were made of armor plate, there was nothing he could do about them except give each one a resounding kick with a heavy steel boot. The sixth was unlocked, but the passengers—a man and a woman—were very evidently and very gruesomely dead.
So was everyone else he could find until he came to a room in which a man in a spacesuit was floundering helplessly in the air. He glanced at his telltale. Thirty-two. High in the red, almost against the pin.
"Bobby! What do you read?"
"Twenty-six."
"Good. I've found only one, but we're running out of time. I'm coming in."