"Come ahead," Mackensie's great voice roared.
Life, or death, can hang upon such a little thing. Directly across the thirty-foot roof deck from me the top of the other side-ladder was visible above the layer of darkness. A man's head and shoulders suddenly appeared there. My weapon leveled; but then I saw that it was Nina's father. He saw me at the same instant, waved at me and jumped from the ladder, wading through the waist-high darkness toward the chart room.
I do feel that there was nothing I could have done. Heaven knows I would give anything now if only I had had some flash of intuition.
But I was thinking only of Nina. I turned to gaze down at her, where she stood a step or two below me on the ladder. "Come on, it's all safe."
Safe? I turned back just in time to see a hand and arm come up out of the layer of darkness. Weird, as though detached from its body, it swung; the fingers loosed a little globe. It was only a few feet behind Blake. The globe hurtled at his head, struck it—an explosive bomb. It burst with a sharp report and a little puff of yellow-red light. Perhaps I caught a glimpse of the ghastly scattered fragments of what had been a human head. There was only a grewsome gory neck-stump as the giant body of Blake toppled down into the layer of darkness.
I fired into the darkness gas. The stab of heat dispelled it a little. I hit nothing. Then, as I jumped from the ladder, forgetful of Nina, from the chart-room window Mackensie was wildly firing from two weapons. One of the sizzling heat-rays barely missed me. And then someone behind him, Wilson perhaps, tossed a light-bomb. Its blinding actinic glare momentarily dispelled the gloom. At the other side companion-ladder we caught a vague glimpse of the massive head and shoulders of Mokk as he leaped down to the lower deck. His triumphant laugh floated up after him.
"You, Penelle, bring the girl in here," Mackensie was roaring. "Hurry now."
I all but carried the half-fainting Nina. The darkness gas was floating away; but I thanked God that enough remained to shroud the fallen headless body of her father as we passed it. The door of the chart room opened; I dashed in with her; hands banged the steel door closed and bolted it.
"I guess we're all here," Mackensie said. The X-87 captain was grim, his thick face puffed with the choleric blood swelling it. His left arm hung almost limp at his side; I saw where his white uniform was burned with the scorching edge of a heat-stab. Young Wilson was here, disheveled, wild-eyed. The little oval to the control turret was open; I could see the fat little Peter Green and James Polter, the purser, in there, crouched at a slit of the forward visor window, weapons in hand. I went in to them.