Grant swore. His hands and feet, inside the space-suit, were warm, but the outer lead gloves that were a part of every radium miner's equipment, and the thick lead soles of their gravity shoes, were at approximately six above absolute zero. A degree, or even half a degree, of warmth, and super-conductivity would cease. They would be free! Their lives, and Joan Conway's fate, depended upon those few precious degrees. Desperately Grant tried to pull his heat-gun from its holster, but to no avail. And the leaden gloves, the gravity shoes, were securely fastened to his space-suit. No chance of removing them without cutting wires or filing bolts.
Grant moved his hands experimentally. They slid sideways, following the lines of magnetic force that crossed the passage, though at different levels; one on a level with the butt of his gun, the other higher and extended in front of his body. Backward and forward motion was also impossible, since that, too, would be contrary to the lines of force. Suddenly Grant stiffened. Arrested motion....
Extending his arm as far as possible without raising it, he crashed his hand against the holstered heat gun that hung at his waist. Again and again the lead-sheathed fist struck the heavy holster in a rain of blows. Miller, watching wide-eyed, shook his head.
"What is it?" he muttered. "You ... you're nuts! If that gun should go off, it'd rip open your suit, kill you!"
"Better than freezing, anyhow," Grant panted. "And if this works...." He redoubled his blows, crashing hand against gun-butt. "Arrested motion gives heat. Like pounding a hammer against an anvil. Only need a degree or so at most. I ... Ah!" He twisted his hand about, found that he could move it freely.
Quickly, before the heat radiated off, Grant drew his heat-gun, focused it on the floor of the defile. Under the lambent blue bolt, the rock began to glow red, waves of heat radiated upward. All at once Grant found himself falling, and his feet struck the glowing rock. The lead soles of his shoes melting like butter on the white-hot rock, he stumbled toward Miller, turned the heat blast on a spot near the latter's feet. Within a few moments the heat had restored resistance to the lead and Miller was free.
"Release the others!" Grant shouted. "And then make tracks to the Comet! I'm going on ahead! Hurry! We've got to reach the ship before Allers takes off for Venus!" Plunging into the shadowy gloom, he headed toward the trail.
Ken Grant had little memory of that wild race across the Cerean Darkside. The thin starlight ... the insane landscape ... the sprawling shadows ... all these made a jumbled montage in his mind. Vaguely he remembered racing onward, onward, muscles aching, until he saw red flashes of light ahead. The Comet's rockets, warming up preparatory to taking off!