Bill lay on an Alpine glacier, a painful broken leg inextricably wedged in a crevasse. It was dark, frightfully cold. In vain he struggled to move, to seek light and warmth, while the grim grip of the ice held him, while bitter wind howled about him and the piercing cold of the blizzard crept numbingly up his limbs.
He came to with a start, realized that it was a dream. But he was none the less freezing, gasping for thin, frigid air, that somehow would not come into his lungs. All about was darkness. He lay on cold metal.
"In the wreck of the Fury!" he thought. "The air is leaking out. And the cold of space! A frozen tomb!"
He must have made a sound, for a groan came from beside him. He fought to draw breath, tried to speak. He choked, and his voice was oddly high and thin.
"Who are——"
He ended in a fit of coughing, felt warm blood spraying from his mouth. Faintly he heard a whisper beside him.
"I'm Brand. The Moon Patrol—fought to the last!"
Bill could speak no more, and evidently the redoubtable captain could not. For a long time they lay in freezing silence. Bill had no hope of life, he felt only very grim satisfaction in the fact that he and Brand had not been killed outright.
But suddenly he was thrilled with hope. He heard a crash of hammer blows upon metal, sharp as the sound of snapping glass in the thin air. Then he heard the thin hiss of an oxygen lance.
Someone was cutting a way to them through the wreckage. Only a moment later, it seemed, a vivid bar of light cleft the darkness, searched the wrecked bridge, settled upon the two limp figures. Bill saw grotesque figures in cumbrous metal space suits clambering through a hole they had cut. He felt an oxygen helmet being fastened about his head, heard the thin hiss of the escaping gas, and was once more able to breathe.