Sandy sat down and shivered.
"I think," she said through chattering teeth, "I think I'm going to have hysterics. L-listen, Pam! I—I saw something alive! It was like a bird this high and big as a—There aren't any birds like that! There can't be anything alive here but us! But I saw it! And it saw me and ran away!"
Pam stared and asked questions, at first soothing ones. But presently she was saying indignantly, "I do believe it! That's near the place where I smelled fresh air!"
Of course, fresh air in the asteroid, two hundred and seventy million miles from Earth, was as impossible as what Sandy had seen.
Holmes came in presently, depressed and tired. He'd been filling his mind with the contents of black cubes. He knew how cooking was done in the kitchens of the fortress, some eons since. He knew how to prepare for inspection of the asteroid by a high-ranking officer. He was fully conversant with the bugle-calls once used in the fortress in the place of a public-address loud-speaker system. But he'd found no hint of how the fortress received its supplies, nor how the air was freshened, nor how reinforcements of men used to reach the asteroid. He was discouraged and vexed and weary.
"Sandy," said Pam challengingly, "saw a live bird, bigger than a goose, in the gravity-machine room."
Holmes shrugged.
"Keller's fidgeting," he observed, "because he thinks he's seen movements in the vision-plates that show different inside views of this thing. But he isn't sure that he's seen anything move. Maybe we're all going out of our minds."
"Then Joe's closest," said Pam darkly. "He worries about Sandy!"
"And very reasonably," said Holmes tiredly. "Pam, this business of figuring that there's something deadly on the way and nothing to do about it—it's got me down!"