He moved his free leg until his knee came into his sight. Slowly, he shoved himself backwards until he could touch the wall with the digital manipulators of one hand. He spread them until they made the greatest possible contact with the metal wall.
Then he raised and lowered his knee slowly. The faint, high scream of the valve pierced his audio nerves.
He opened his mouth and called with a voice that thundered in his own ears. "Open up! Open the icebox. Bryan Kimberly — in the icebox. Open —"
A carrier — and a modulation. The one point of contact between the inside and outside of the suit was the manipulators. Though they had an intermediate section of heat inert plastic, they were rigid. They would carry the supersonic vibrations from the valve to the wall. His voice alone would never pass through the manipulators in force sufficient to reach the mike. As he called, the vibrations of his voice produced pressure changes within the suit and the valve responded at like frequency, modulating the high-pitched sound it generated. And those narrow fingers might be able to carry that spear of inaudible sound with his voice riding its back out to the wall.
He pictured the rest of the pathway — up the metal wall to the mike chamber where the supersonic component would be lost on the condenser element. Would his voice component be strong enough to activate it?
He couldn't know. He could only try. And the still active Kimberly Joints would not remain intact indefinitely. Already they were moving on borrowed time.
He remembered that George, the watchman passed the assembly line on his hourly rounds at about ten minutes after the hour. He'd seen him only a couple of nights ago checking the watch station near the icebox.
He adjusted his calls to half minute intervals except for six or seven minutes before and after that critical time when George ought to be in the vicinity.
The hours stretched past dawn and rawness grew in his throat. The deafening, insistent roar of his own voice echoed in his head. And no response had come. He felt that there had been moments of unconsciousness during the night, and he dreaded that he might have missed a single chance for rescue. He glanced at the clock face. George was gone by now. Kimberly wasn't sure how the day watch was handled on week ends. He gave up the continuous calling and maintained the intermittent schedule as nearly as he could.