Thomakein nodded again, replaced the recording, and then paced the derelict Mardinex for a full hour with every constant at his disposal on the recorders.
At the end of that hour, Thomakein noted that nothing had registered and he smiled with assurance.
He stretched and said to himself: "I can stand under four gravities. I can live under twelve with the standard Ertinian acceleration garb. But sixteen gravities for one hour? Never."
Thomakein noted the acceleration of the derelict as being slightly over six gravities on his own accelerometer, which registered the Ertinian constant.
Then he began to maneuver his little ship toward the derelict.
Entering the Mardinex through the blasted observation dome was no great problem. The lower meteor spotters and most of the machinery had gone with the dome and so no pressor came forth to keep Thomakein from his intention.
The insides were a mess. Broken girders and ruined equipment made a bad tangle of the lower third of the great warship. Thomakein jockeyed the little ship back and forth inside of the derelict until he had lodged it against the remainder of a lower deck in such a manner as to keep it there under the six Terran gravities of acceleration. Then he donned spacesuit and started to prowl the ship. It was painful and heavy going, but Thomakein made it slowly.
An hour later, Thomakein heard the ringing of alarms, coming from somewhere up above, and the sound made him stop suddenly. Sound, he reasoned, requires air for propagation. The sound came through the floor, but somewhere there must be air inside of the derelict.
So upward he went through the damage. He found an air-tight door and fought the catch until it puffed open, nearly throwing him back into the damaged opening. White-faced, Thomakein held on until his breath returned, and then with a determined look at the gap below—and the place where he would have been if he had fallen out of the derelict—Thomakein tried the door again. He closed the outer door and tried the inner.