His alien grasp of mechanics was not universal enough to discover his trouble immediately. But it was logical, and logic told him to look for the air vent. He found it, and turned the valve permitting air to enter the air-tight door system. The inner door opened easily and Thomakein entered a portion of the hull where the alarm bells rang loud and clear.
He found them ringing in a room filled with control instruments. Throwing the dome of his suit back over his head, Thomakein looked around him with interest. There was nothing in the room that logic or a grasp of elementary mechanics could solve. It did Thomakein no good to look at the Martian characters that labeled the instruments and dials, for he recognized nothing of any part of the Solar System.
He did recognize the bloody lump of inert flesh as having once been the operator of this room—or one of them he came to conclude as his search found others.
Thomakein was not squeamish. But they did litter up the place and the pools of blood made the floor slippery which was dangerous under 6-G Terran—or for Thomakein, five point six eight. So Thomakein struggled with the Martian bodies and hauled them to the corridor where he let them drop over the edge of the central well onto the bulkhead below. He returned to the instrument room in an attempt to find out what the bell-ringing could mean.
He inspected the celestial globe with some interest until he noticed that the upper limb contained some minute, luminous spheres—prolate spheroids to be exact. Wondering, Thomakein tried to look forward and up with respect to the ship's course.
His anxiety increased. He was about to meet a whole battle fleet that was spread out in a dragnet pattern. Then before he could worry about it he was through the network and some of the ships tried to follow but with no success. The Mardinex bucked and pitched as tractors were applied and subsequently broken as the tension reached overload values.
Thomakein smiled. Their inability to catch him plus their obvious willingness to let the matter drop with but a perfunctory try gave him sufficient evidence as to their origin.
They could never catch a ship under six gravities when the best they could do was three. The functions with respect to one another would be as though the faster ship were accelerating away from the slower ship by 3-G plus the initial velocity of the faster ship's intrinsic speed, for the pursuers were standing still.
The Mardinex swept out past Mars and Thomakein smiled more and more. This maze of equipment was better than anything that he had expected. The Ertinians would really get the information as to the kind of people who inhabited this system.