“I’m ... here,” she panted. “I’m dizzy, but I ... think I’m all right—”
The battery-powered emergency light came on. It was faint, but he saw her clinging to a bank of instruments where she’d been thrown by the collision. He moved to go to her, and found himself floating in midair. But he drifted to a side wall and worked his way to her.
She clung to him, shivering.
“I ... think,” she said unsteadily, “that we’re going to die. Aren’t we?”
“We’ll see,” he told her. “Hold on to me.”
Guided by the emergency light, he scrambled to the bank of communicator-buttons. What had been the floor was now a side wall. He climbed it and thumbed the navigation-room switch.
“Radar room reporting,” he said curtly. “Power out, gravity off, no reports from outside from power failure. No great physical damage.”
He began to hear other voices. There had never been an actual space-collision in the memory of man, but reports came crisply, and the cut-in speakers in the radar room repeated them. Ship-gravity was out all over the ship. Emergency lights were functioning, and were all the lights there were. There was a slight, unexplained gravity-drift toward what had been the ship’s port side. But damage-control reported no loss of pressure in the Niccola’s inner hull, though four areas between inner and outer hulls had lost air pressure to space.
“Mr. Baird,” rasped the skipper. “We’re blind! Forget everything else and give us eyes to see with!”
“We’ll try battery power to the vision plates,” Baird told Diane. “No full resolution, but better than nothing—”