Light returned as the automatic emergency incandescent lights in the room, fed from an energy store coil, flashed on abruptly. The men were white-faced, tense in their positions. Swiftly Morey was looking over the indicators on his remote-reading panel, while Arcot stared at the few dials before the actual control board.
"There's an air pressure outside the ship!" he cried out in surprise. "High oxygen, very little nitrogen, breathable apparently, provided there are no poisons. Temperature ten below zero C."
"Lights are off because relays opened when the crash short circuited them." Morey and the entire group were suddenly shaking.
"Nervous shock," commented Zezdon Afthen. "It will be an hour or more before we will be in condition to work."
"Can't wait," replied Arcot testily, his nerves on edge, too.
"Morey, make some good strong coffee if you can, and we'll waste a little air on some smokes."
Morey rose and went to the door that led through the main passage to the galley. "Heck of a job—no weight at all," he muttered. "There is air in the passage, anyway." He opened the door, and the air rushed from the control room to the passage till the pressure was equalized. The door to the power room was shut, but it was bulged, despite its two-inch lux metal, and through its clear material he could see the wreckage of the power room.
"Arcot," he called. "Come here and look at the power room. Quintillions of miles from home, we can't shut off this field now."
Arcot was with him in a moment. The tremendous mass of the nose of the Thessian ship had caught them full amid-ship, and the powerful ram had driven through the room. Their lux walls had not been touched; only a sledge-hammer blow would have bent them under any circumstances, let alone breaking them. But the tremendously powerful main generator was split wide open. And the mechanical damage was awful. The prow of the ship had been driven deep into the machine, and the power room was a wreck.
"And," pointed out Morey, "we can't handle a job like that. It will take a tremendous amount of machinery back on a planet to work that stuff, and we couldn't bend that bar, let alone fix it."