Neither of them had yet fallen to the ground. That would take several minutes under this low gravity. He left them to drop and headed toward the open airlock.
This was what he had been waiting for all those nineteen days in cataleptic hypnosis. He couldn't have cut his way into the hideout from the outside; he had had to wait until it was opened, and that time had come only with the supply ship.
Once in the airlock, he touched the control stud that would close the outer door, pump air into the waiting room, and open the inner door. Here was his greatest point of danger—greater, even, than the danger of coming to the planetoid itself, or the danger of waiting nineteen days in a cataleptic trance for the coming of the supply ship. If the ones who remained within suspected anything—anything at all!—then his chances of coming out of this alive were practically nil.
But there was no reason why they should suspect. They should think that the man coming in was one of their own. The radio contact between the men outside had been limited to a few micromilliwatts of power—necessarily, since radio waves of very small wattage can be decoded at tremendous distances in open space. The men inside the planetoid certainly should not have been able to pick up any more than the beginning of the early conversation before it had been cut completely off by the intervening layers of solid rock.
The chamber he entered was a high-speed airlock. Unlike the soundless discharge of his special gun in the outer airlessness, the blast of air that came into the waiting chamber was like a hurricane in noise and force. The room filled with air in a very few seconds.
The detective held on to the handholds tightly while the brief but violent winds buffeted him. He turned as the inner door opened.
His eyes took in the picture in a fraction of a second. In an even smaller fraction, his mind assimilated the picture.
The woman was dark-haired, dark-eyed, and muscular. Her mouth was wide and thick-lipped beneath a large nose.
The man was leaner and lighter, bony-faced, and beady-eyed.
The woman said: "Fritz, what—?"