As he fell on his face, an unknown number of yards nearer, a great alien passed him, the mighty sole slamming the rock a few feet from his prone body. Pink struggled upright and balanced on the right leg and made another hop. This time he didn't fall when he lit. Praying thankfully for the two seconds that saved, he sprang again. And fell, painfully.
It was a useless piece of bravado. It was impossible to reach the ship. He got up and leaped. He fell. He forced himself up and sprang and didn't fall and sprang and fell.
He couldn't waste a blink of time in looking at the watch or yelling with agony or even praying now. He went through his routine automatically, his mind a thing of terror. Eons seemed to pass him by as he hopped over the djinn-infested gray rock plain.
A superb spring took him abreast of the big lead vat. What wild scenes of delirium were going on there he could not even imagine. He hopped twice more and was at the ship.
At any instant, at this very second the ship would blossom into red-white carnage of metal and flesh and death. Impossibly Pink stood on his good leg and aimed for the scanner-port which he knew, or hoped, connected with the screen in the control room where Jackson sat.
Now the Elephant's Child was done, Jackson was shoving the switch over, now it would all disintegrate in his face. He flew through space and struck the hull flat; all the perishing strength in him glued his body, his fingers in their thin gloves, to that curving surface. His great helmet, with the crest insignia of comets and spears that marked him as the captain, hung for a short time directly in front of the scanner-port.
He shook his head violently, back and forth, back and forth. No, he screamed in his mind, wishing insanely that his radio were constructed so that it could be heard in the ship. No, he shook, no, no!
Then his precarious grip on the smooth side slid off, and Captain Pinkham fell lightly but finally to the asteroid.
He lay there unresisting. He had done his best, absolutely his damned best. Let it blow. Let it blow.
After a while he looked at his glove watch. It was two minutes past the time for explosion.