"I don't get it," said Raeburn, throwing up his hands in despair. "He isn't like a man any more. He isn't like anything living. It's his ship, and he ought to know more about it than anyone. Oh well, if everybody else is going to give up the ghost, why should I worry?"
"Sure," said Lana. "Why should we worry. Maybe his surmise wasn't true. Maybe it's something else holding us down. Maybe it's our imagination."
She sat down, her mind in a daze. How long she sat there in a trance-like state she didn't know, but a movement from Lonny Higgens aroused her. Link Raeburn was stretched out on the floor, his mouth wide open, eyes closed with complete exhaustion and utter relaxation.
"I think I've got an idea," said Lonny, stretching his arms and staggering to his feet. He looked at the controls and found that they were at the same depth. 6,541 feet. Their position had not altered a trifle. "We've been here over eight hours. No barometric storm ever lasted that long on Uranus. The pressure must have been released on the upper surface by now. And we've got to have a heavy pressure area again somewhere. It just occurred to me that we might create that heavy pressure on the roof of this ledge that we're under, which would suffice just as well."
"But how?" demanded Lana, and followed as he went to the berylumin hull at one end of the control room and pulled down a shutter. He had exposed a transparent plate of glassite, now black as ink with the outer mud, in whose center a pair of binoculars had been frozen into the vitreous substance.
"We'll use the field glass as a terminal," he explained, making disconnections at the control board and bringing two current wires in the direction of the wall. He affixed one wire to the binoculars and clamped the other against a rim of the porte. "This glassite will act as an insulator and we can force an electric current through the outer mud. There's a possibility that the current will react on the watery content to release hydrogen and oxygen through electrolysis. I really don't think it will work, but it's a good way to occupy our minds."
She watched as he made the terminals secure, then stepped up the amperage on the desk instruments. Very faintly, blue lightning flashes of electricity could be seen streaking through the outer mud against the glassite. For long moments they watched as nothing happened.
Then he sighed disappointedly.
"No use, I guess," he said reluctantly. "Too much outer pressure for gases to form."