"Oh yes. Thank you, Rhan." Venta was trembling now with excitement. "When we get lower into the atmosphere, we'll go to one of the pressure-portes at the bottom of the hull. There are space suits there, if we can get to them."
"Let's close this door," Jim said quickly. "Not so loud, Venta."
We planned it, as the ship settled down through the heavy, sullen-looking Venus clouds and then burst out into the lower atmosphere with the dark surface of Venus far down beneath us. Rhan watched and reported that Curtmann and most of his men were forward by the control turret. Then Jim, Venta and I were able to get down through one of the dim corridors, down a little catwalk ladder into the lower hull. The metal pressure porte door was locked.
I stood at the bottom of the ladder. Above me the voices of Curtmann's ruffians were audible. Every moment I expected that we would be missed.
"Hurry it," I murmured.
The porte doorlock melted as Jim held the torch upon it. We slid into the porte, closed the door after us. Venta, on the voyage to Earth, had been trained by Curtmann in the use of these pressure-suits, and in a moment we stood in them, helmeted, with the air bloating the suits so that we were shapeless monsters.
I opened the outer doorslide. A little at first, and then wider. In the rarified atmosphere of Venus at this fifty mile height, the air of the little porte went out with a rush. It blew us out with it. I had a sickening sensation of falling into nothingness. Then it seemed that my head steadied. I fumbled with a hand upon the anti-gravity mechanisms by which the fall could be guided.
Above me the dark finned shape of Curtmann's space ship was drawing swiftly upward and away. Head down, with the bloated shapes of Jim and Venta beside me, we plummeted like falling meteorites through the sub-stratosphere darkness.
III