Bowman pushed her into a chair—but hard. He said, "You're waiting here! With us. You'll only be in his way. Johnny's the tech man on this ship. If anybody can save us, he's the one." But as her head lowered, his eyes met mine. And the words were written there, "Not this time—"
Still, we had to do something. We couldn't just sit there and take it blind. We had to know what was going on. So we cut in the visiplate to the corridor outside the storage bins. It was a dismal scene that appeared before us.
The long corridor was deserted save for a thin sliver of something oozing out of an adjacent chamber. As we watched, this sliver turned to a bulky, rolling mass; became the doughy body of the mysterious matter in which the Pegasus was caught. Like a ponderous wave it surged up the corridor, straining into every crack and crevice, engulfing everything it met.
We saw a tiny, gray ship mouse scurry from under a doorway, hesitate as one pink foot slipped into the sluggish excrescence.
It tugged, trying to get free. But it was like a fly snared on flypaper. It couldn't move. In a few seconds it disappeared. Lorraine began crying softly. I turned away, too sickened to condemn myself again for having loosed this thing amongst us.
Then there were bright gleams in the visiplate, and Johnny, accompanied by three or four not-at-all eager sailors, entered the corridor. As he passed the visiplate, he looked up and grinned at us, nodded encouragingly. Then he ducked into one of the storage bins.
He came out staggering under the load of a heavy, wooden crate. He began ripping the top off this frantically, motioned his assistants to get other similar boxes from the bin and open them. They did so, but one look at their pans told us they didn't like this business nohow!
Finally he had the box open. He tore out a portion of the contents. And—
"Has he gone nuts?" raged Bowman. "That's only that medical junk for Mars! That zy-something extract!"