Burke swore. There were other thumpings. Louder ones. They were on the air-lock door.
"If you try to put us out," said Sandy calmly, "you'll have to open that door and they'll try to fight their way in—and then where'll you be?"
Keller turned from the checking of the last instrument He looked at the others with excited eyes. He waited.
"I don't know what they can arrest you for," said Sandy, "and maybe they don't either, unless it's unauthorized artillery practice. But you can't put us out! And you know darn well that unless you do something they'll chop their way in!"
Burke said, "Dammit, they're not going to stop me from finding out if this thing works!"
He squirmed in a chair which had its base firmly fastened to a wall and began to punch buttons.
"Hold fast!" he said angrily. "At least we'll see...."
There were loud snapping sounds. There were creakings. The room stirred. It turned in a completely unbelievable fashion. Violent crashings sounded outside. Abruptly, a small television screen before Burke acquired an image. It was of the outside world reeling wildly. Holmes seized a hand-hold and grabbed Pam. He kept her from falling as a side wall became the floor, and what had been the floor became a side wall, with the ceiling another. It seemed that all the cosmos changed, though only walls and floors changed places.
Suddenly everything seemed normal but new. The surface underfoot was covered with a rubber mat. The hydroponic wall-garden sections were now vertical. Burke sat upright, and something over his head rotated a half-turn and was still. But it became coated with frost.
More crashes. More small television screens acquired images. They showed the office of Burke Development, Inc., against a tilted landscape. The landscape leveled. Another showed the construction shed. One showed cloud formations, very bright and distinct. And two others showed a small, armed, formidable body of men instinctively backing away from the outside television lens.