"Order all our crew down to the cruiser's lower space-door," I cried, "and have an emergency space-suit issued to each of them!"
They stared at me, strangely, tensely. "What are you going to do?" asked Jhul Din, at last, and my answer came out in a shout.
"We're going to do what never yet has been done in all the battles between the stars!" I told him. "We're going to put our lives on one last mad chance and board that enemy ship in mid-space!"
4. A Struggle Between the Stars
A moment there was silence in the pilot room, a silence of sheer surprize, in which my two lieutenants gazed at me in utter amazement, and then from Jhul Din came a great shout.
"It's a chance!" he cried. "If we can do it we'll escape yet!"
"Down to the space-door at once, then!" I told him. "The ship can't last for seconds now!"
For even then there had come to our ears another long, cracking roar as our battered walls gave still farther. Now Jhul Din was racing down from the pilot room to assemble the crew, and now our cruiser was slanting still farther down toward the long, gleaming oval ship beneath. Down we slanted, until our own swaying cruiser hung at a distance of a score of feet above the enemy ship, which, believing us destroyed, never dreamed of our presence as we raced on through space at the same speed as itself. And now Korus Kan hastily set the automatic controls in the pilot room that would hold our cruiser at the same speed and course without guiding hand, and then we too hurled ourselves down the narrow stair, through the big power room where the great generators were still throbbing on, down through the succession of compartments in the cruiser's hull until we had reached the long, low room that lay at its very bottom, and in the floor of which was set the cruiser's lower space-door.
In the long room all our crew was gathered now, with Jhul Din at their head, a hundred odd in number, and a strange enough aggregation they were, drawn as they were from the far-different races of the galaxy's peopled stars. Octopus-beings from Vega, great plant-men from Capella, spider-shapes from Mizar—these and a score or more of differing forms and shapes stood before me, listening in disciplined silence as I briefly explained our plan. About us the walls were wrenching and cracking fearfully, but when I had finished those before me raised a fierce shout, and then each of us was hastily climbing into the emergency space-suits which were kept always in all interstellar ships in case outside repairs to it were necessary in mid-space.