It took whole seconds to match the final few yards per second per second of decelaration against the free-flight velocity of the lifeship. Then it took more dragging seconds to urge the tender in an alongside course that brought lifeship and tender port to port.
They matched, and Wilson hit the lever that powered the annular magnet that snapped the two space-locks together hard enough to compress the bellows into an air-seal.
He was at the space lock before the two ships had really settled together. He was spinning the hand wheel, then clutching at the fast-escape lever of the lifeship.
"Hike!" he bellowed, as the lifeship lock opened. "Hike! We've got twenty seconds before—"
His voice stopped dead, his heart faltered a beat, and his mind rebelled at the shock of what he saw.
Charles Andrews was lying on one bunk, his bleeding hands staining the blanket. His breath was shallow and regular, but he was wheezing with every breath. It was the sound made by someone who has lain far too long in a semi-coma, until nervous system and automatic reactions have become so dulled that phlegm in the throat does not produce a cough.
Jock Norton lay on his back with his eyes not quite closed, but all that was visible was the whites below the iris because his eyes were turned up. His right hand dangled to the floor beside the bunk, his left arm lay limply around the shoulders of the girl.
Alice's face was buried on Norton's shoulder, her left arm flopped loose across Norton's chest. Her right was trapped beneath her.
As Wilson looked, Norton's shallow breath clogged and he began what would have been a wallop of a cough, but his breath did not waver. His clogged windpipe kept making little soggy noises as the wind-stream changed in and out and in and out.
On the floor a few inches away from Jock Norton's hands was a bottle of capsules.