Tolliver kicked at the edge of the door experimentally. It seemed to give slightly, so he knocked the burning papers aside and drove his heel hard at the corner below the hinge.
The plastic yielded.
"That's enough already, Tolliver," whispered the girl. "We can crawl through!"
Hardly sixty seconds later, he led her into a maze of stacked crates in the warehouse proper. The building was not much longer than wide, for each of the structures in the colony had its own hemispherical emergency dome of transparent plastic. They soon reached the other end.
"I think there's a storeroom for spacesuits around here," muttered Tolliver.
"Why do you want them?"
"Honey, I just don't think it will be so easy to lay hands on a tractor. I bet Jeffers already phoned the garage and all the airlocks with some good lie that will keep me from getting through."
After a brief search, he located the spacesuits. Many, evidently intended for replacements, had never been unpacked, but there were a dozen or so serviced and standing ready for emergencies. He showed Betty how to climb into one, and checked her seals and valves after donning a suit himself.
"That switch under your chin," he said, touching helmets so she could hear him. "Leave it turned off. Anybody might be listening!"