"Yes."
I could feel the floor grid of the chamber shuddering beneath my feet. The Cometara was cracking, bursting outward throughout her length; at any instant she might collapse.
For a moment we stood poised. Beneath us, here at the brink were millions upon millions of miles of emptiness, the remote, unfathomable void. Blazing worlds down there in the black darkness.
"Good-by, Gregg. It may be the end for us."
"Good luck, Johnny."
His bloated figure dropped away from me. I waited just an instant, and then I dove into space.
For a moment there was a chaos of strangeness, the wrench to my sense of the transition. I had been the inhabitant of a little world, the Cometara, with a gravity beneath my feet. Now, in a breath, I had no world to inhabit. I was alone in space. No gravity; nothing solid to touch; emptiness.
I was in a world to myself, and the abnormality of it brought a mental shock. But in a moment the adjustment came. I passed the transition, the sense of falling.
The firmament steadied and my senses cleared. My dive from the Cometara carried me in a slow arc some three hundred feet away. There had been a sense of falling, but no actual fall. My velocity was retarded, with the mass of the Cometara pulling at me. I went like a toy boat in water shoved by a child, quickly slowing. In a few moments, the velocity was gone, and I hung poised. I saw Grantline's bloated form not over fifty feet from me. He waved an arm at me.
Out here in the void I lay weightless, as though upon an infinitely soft feather bed. I could kick, flounder, but not endow myself with motion. I craned my neck, gazed around through the bulging vizor pane.