This time, however, there was no blinding flare of small rockets. The blacking out of the screen coincided with Donna's scream. "It hit!"
In the silence that followed, he thought he heard a sob.
"Oh, Phillips," she said, recovering, "we did it. They're—"
"Hang on," said Phillips. "I'll climb into a spacesuit and come forward."
He switched off the intercom and dragged a suit from the rack. It took him a good fifteen minutes to get the helmet screwed on properly and to check everything else. He realized that he was very tired.
He opened the exit hatch, seized the top of the ladder in his gauntlets as the air exploded out of the turret, and climbed back to the main deck.
Clumping forward through the airless corridor, he stopped to look into the compartment where he had left Brecken. He quickly slid the door shut again.
He found that Donna had sealed off the corridor just short of the control room by closing a double emergency door that must have been designed to form an airlock in just such a situation. He hammered upon it, and she slid it open from the control desk.
It closed again behind him, and he entered the control room through the usual door. The girl helped him to remove the suit and motioned him toward the screen.