"Something's been wrong with the ship's air!" snapped McCauley, feeling more like himself every second. "It's no good! Breathe deep, Randy! Breathe deep!"
Randy obeyed. His eyes cleared.
"Bramwell!" snapped McCauley. "Get him in a suit! He hasn't sense enough to do it himself!"
He flung himself at the control board. The leak was....
But there was no leak. The leak alarm had rung, but every pressure indicator in every part of the ship showed the same figure. It was.... McCauley gazed incredulously at the dials. The ship's interior pressure was 12.8 pounds to the square inch as against a normal 14.7. The difference was enough to set off the leak alarm, but a thinning of the air like this was not enough to cause the stupidity, the lethargy, the confused and helpless thinking which McCauley—marveling—realized had appeared during the past three weeks.
He heard a howling noise between the clamors of the gongs. It was Bramwell.
"You're making a noise!" wailed Bramwell. "I can't have a noise! I must have quiet...."
McCauley spoke crisply into the transmitter, sending a tight-beam message back to Earth. It would be minutes before it was received, as against the less-than-two-second lag in a message sent from the moon to Earth.
"We were suffering from oxygen starvation," said McCauley briskly. "The plants in the air-system's hydroponic garden absorbed carbon dioxide and gave off oxygen, but not quite cent per cent. There was a steady small loss of oxygen in the ship, caused by the use of oxygen as well as carbon by the growing plants. This small loss should have been made up by the addition of oxygen to keep the volume of the ship's air constant. But it happened that the oxygen flutter valve became jammed...."
He heard an explosive sigh of relief behind him, but he carefully did not look up at Bramwell. Bramwell was very silent these days, and he practiced extreme self-control. He realized now that he'd let too many things bother him. But he was still bothered, and horribly so, by the memory of his inability to make up his mind to face the journey in space, or to arrange for somebody to substitute for him, so he'd had to be shanghaied. He was even more bothered by the memory of his behavior when he found himself in a ship off for a swing in to Venus and out again. McCauley and Randy ignored these past happenings, and Bramwell would never be able to bring himself to mention them. But he was very much ashamed.