Channing got after borrowing a spare flashlight from the doctor.
He found Hadley up in the instrument room with a half dozen of his men. They were a mass of minor and major cuts and injuries, and were working under a single incandescent lamp that had been wired to the battery direct by means of spare cable. The wire went snaking through the air in a foolish, crooked line, suspended on nothing. Hadley's gang were applying first aid to one another and cursing the lack of gravity.
"Help?" said Channing.
"Need it or offer it?" asked Hadley with a smile.
"Offer it. You'll need it."
"You can say that again—and then pitch in. You're Channing, of Communications, aren't you? We're going to have a mad scramble on the main circuits of this tub before we can unwind it. I don't think there's an instrument working in the whole ship."
"You can't unravel the whole works, can you?"
"Won't try. About all we can do is replace the lighting system and hang the dead cathodes in again. They'll be all right to take us out of this cockeyed skew-curve and probably will last long enough to keep a half-G floor under us for tinkering, for maybe forty or fifty hours. Assistant Pilot Darlange will have to learn how to run a ship by the seat of his pants—as far as I can guess there isn't even a splinter of glass left in the pilot room—so he'll have to correct this flight by feel and by using a haywire panel."
"Darlange is a school-pilot," grinned one of Hadley's men.