They turned slowly as they floated there, the immense starry firmament seeming to revolve around them. Rab glimpsed Lalla Dee's white face, conscious now, through the glassite front of her helmet. His own heart was numb with the cold of ultimate failure.
A few lights appeared against the stars in the direction opposite that in which the Vulcan had gone. The lights came closer and Rab saw they were those of a long, grim black spaceship coming slowly and cautiously through the void. The Martian cruiser that had been secretly trailing the Vulcan!
Kark Al flashed his hand-rocket three times, then repeated the signal. The Martian cruiser veered, came toward them, its bow rocket-tubes firing to brake its speed. The human chain was drawn slowly toward the cruiser by its gravitational attraction. Soon they bumped along its metal side.
Kark Al drew them toward a space lock that waited, open and ready. He jerked them inside and shut the outer door. Air hissed into the lock from storage tanks. Then the inner door of the lock opened and into it ran a half-dozen men; red-skinned, bristling-haired Martian officers in the gray uniform of their planet, and pulled them into the ship's inside.
One of them was the captain of the cruiser. Excitedly he helped Kark Al out of his spacesuit. Crane and Lalla Dee, still in their suits, lay beside the silent robot.
"Nald Arkol, did you get the great secret?" the Martian captain cried.
Kark Al's eyes flashed behind his spectacles as he answered, pointing to the square insulated case he had brought.
"Yes, I got it! The brain of Doctor Alph and his secret!"
He drew from his pocket a metal tube and took out of it a glassite vial filled with a yellow, fluffy substance.
He held it up proudly.