The receiver in his space suit crisped with sound.
"Jed! Have you got into that engine room yet? For cripes sake, Jed, we're falling."
That was Nielson, on the bridge. He sounded frantic.
Sixteen feet the first second, then thirty-two, then sixty-four. They had miles to fall, but their rate of fall progressed geometrically. They had spent many minutes fighting their way through the air tight doors. One hundred and twenty-eight feet the fourth second. Jed's mind was racing.
No, by thunder, that was acceleration under an earth gravity. They didn't know the gravity here. It might be less.
It might be more.
Ron Val had run forward and was kneeling beside Sarkoff.
"Let them go," Hargraves said roughly. "Ron Val, you check the drivers. You—" Swiftly he assigned them tasks, reserving the control panel for himself.
They were specialists. Noble, the blond youth, frantically examining the atomics, was a bio-chemist. Ushur, the powerfully built man who had stood at Ron Val's right hand on the negatron, was an archeologist.