"The exit-porte," I muttered. "Brenda, make your father hurry."
Fumes of green-yellow chlorine mingled with oil-smoke, were surging around us as we staggered up the little catwalk from the balcony to the dome-top. Jerome may have seen us. His voice was shouting desperate orders, and curses, but whether at us or not I never knew. A gunner down on the deck fired at us with a hand-ray, but it missed.
"Brenda, hurry! Get your father into a space-suit."
She and I still were garbed in the space-suits from the Seven Stars. In the tiny exit-porte, one of Jerome's crew, himself trying to escape, lunged at me, but I felled him with a blow of my fist into his face. The closing slide-door of the tiny pressure chamber shut away the chaos. Then our suits were inflated; our helmets fixed and we catapulted into the glare of outside space. I flung on my rocket-stream; clung to Brenda and her father. My metal-tipped fingers on the metallic plate of her shoulder made audiphone contact.
"Hold tight, Brenda."
"Yes, Jim."
"I'll tow us."
Horrible, chaotic seconds as the showering electronic sparks from the doomed phantom flyer enveloped us. Indescribable glaring confusion of deranged electricity and fusing, bubbling, flying metal-fragments. Prismatic light that blinded.
We came through it in a moment, out into the starlight with the glaring, staggering vessel, receding behind and above us as my rocket-stream and gravity-plates drew us out of the line of fire. The patrolship was hardly ten miles away now. I signalled with a helmet-flare. Interplanetary Code signal. Rollins saw it; recognized it; answered it!
We hurtled forward. Behind us, well overhead now, Jerome's harried, wavering ship suddenly cracked. With a great burst of interior pressure the dome, to which Rollins' main beam had shifted, abruptly exploded outward. Ghastly, silent explosion. It spewed wreckage. Little hurtling dots of shattered glassite and metal and mangled humans—blobs that spewed out, were caught by the vessel's attraction, finding their orbits so that they circled, gruesome satellites of their convulsed world.