For, suddenly, the ship was intolerably hot!
I have held a piece of iron in my hand, in the field of a powerful magnet, until it was heated blistering hot by the hysteresis effect. I have seen a potato cooked with ultra-short radio waves. Some force in that radiation-barrier produced a similar phenomenon—but a million times more intense.
The ship was plunging through a cloud of angry red. It seemed to me that the very metal of her hull was almost incandescent. Paint bubbled and smoked. The air, when I tried to inhale, seared my lungs. A million needles of intolerable heat were probing my body.
Verel Erin slipped down in a little white heap, beside Kel Aran. Big Zerek Oom came swaying out of his galley, with a wet towel wrapped around his head.
"That cursed stove!" he gasped. "Gone wrong—"
He toppled, in the corridor.
The grimly crouching Earthman swayed over the controls, and dashed perspiration out of his eyes. I smelt burning skin, and saw the white smoke from his hands, where they gripped the metal bars.
"Barihorn!" he gasped. "If you can lift Verel—the hot deck—"
Another quarter minute, I think, would have completed the matter of roasting us. But we had struck the barrier zone with a velocity many times that of light. Despite the repulsion that had checked our flight, that terrific momentum carried us through.