"The devil! We've been waiting for things to happen, and they already have! It's our move."
"According to that needle," agreed Holmes, "somebody has kindly put thirty point seven mercury inches of air-pressure around the ship outside. We can walk out and breathe, now."
"If," said Burke, "it's air. It could be something else. I'll have to check it."
He got out the self-contained diving apparatus that had been brought along to serve as a strictly temporary space suit.
"I'll try a cigarette-lighter. Maybe it will burn naturally. Maybe it will go out. It could make an explosion. But I doubt that very much."
"We'll hope," said Holmes, "that the lighter burns."
Burke climbed into the diving suit, which had been designed for amateurs of undersea fishing to use in chilly waters. On Earth it would have been intolerably heavy, for a man moving about out of the ocean. But there was no weight here. If M-387 had a gravitational field at all, which in theory it had to have, it would be on the order of millionths of the pull of Earth.
Keller sat in the control-chair, watching the instruments and the outside television screens which showed the bore now reduced to fifty feet. Somehow the more distant parts of the tunnel looked hazy, as if there were a slight mist in whatever gas had been released in it. Sandy watched Burke pull on the helmet and close the face-plate. She grasped a hand-hold, her knuckles turning white. Pam nestled comfortably in a corner of the ceiling of the control-room. Holmes frowned as Burke went into the air-lock and closed the inner door.
His voice came immediately out of a speaker at the control-desk.
"I'm breathing canned air from the suit," he said curtly.