He hurried aloft to the control room, pausing briefly to listen to the snoring along the curved corridor of the passenger's section.
Lamps told him the story in a series of quick appraisals, because of some long-forgotten genius who had insisted that, whenever possible, warning devices should not be fused, should not be turn-offable, should not be destructible. The Lancaster was a fine ship, designed well, but a frontal attack on a panel with metal-cutting tools consists of making the exception to the 'wherever possible' part of the design of warning signals. The ship's bell-system had been opened like a tin can.
But there was another warning system: the pilot-lamp system, which was strung here and there behind the panels and it would have needed a major overhaul to be ruined; the saboteur would have spent all night just opening cans instead of doing his dirty work inside them. Farradyne should have been asleep; then he would not have noticed the blazing lamps, which told him exactly what was amiss in the ship, and where.
They told him the tale in a glance:
The low-pressure center of the ship was down in the pile-bay, and the reason was that one of the little scuttle-doors was open. The pressure in the reaction-mass bay was low, and now that Farradyne had come aloft, opening the upper levels, the pressure here was as low as down in the reaction-mass bay.
As he watched, another one of the scuttle ports swung open and its warning lamp flared into life.
Farradyne went into action. He ripped open the cabinet that held his spacesuit and clawed the thing from its hook. He started down the stairway on a stumbling run, getting into the suit by leaps and jumps and pauses. He realized that he could have moved faster if he stopped to do one thing at a time, but his frantic mind would not permit him to make haste slowly. He stumbled and bounced off walls, and the tanks on his back rapped against his shoulder blades and the helmet cut a divot out of the bridge of his nose.
He had zipped up the airtight closures by the time he reached the little workshop, and he ducked in there to get a weapon of some sort. He reached past the hammer, ignored the obvious chisel because it was not heavy, even though it were sharp, and picked up a fourteen-inch half-round rasp. He hefted it in his gloved hand and it felt about right.
The air-break on the topside was still open, and Farradyne closed it. He fretted at the seconds necessary to equalize the pressure, but used them sensibly to check the workings of the space suit. He also located the cause of the air-leakage; normally the air-break doors were airtight. A sliver of wool or cotton string lay in the rubber gasket and produced a channel for the escape of some of the air into the pile-bay. Farradyne stooped, as anyone will, his attention attracted by this trifle. It was neither wool nor cotton, but a match torn from a giveaway book.