"We've taken off!" I shouted in the same instant.
"They couldn't." That was Bill Cuff, jiggling a useless lever furiously. "Unless you ordered them too, you damn—"
"I did no such thing!" screeched Skagarach. If the viewers had been on, they would have seen that we were still on the ground. If Howard hadn't started the mirrors out, they'd have discovered my sabotage on the screens. The gamble had thus far panned out. Now I had to make the last try. I shoved open the door at my elbow, dashed into the chamber which held the air blower pump. Yelling wildly, "What'll we do now?" I followed Howard's instructions for bringing the blower to full power. Then I leaped into the other room again.
They were so demoralized that I might have shot them both in that moment. Something held me from it. I think it was their inhuman strength, the knowledge that these two were the highest product of a race that was not human. Despite the dark blood I knew ran in my body too, I could not feel that I was Neanderthal; and I could not tackle the two toughest Neanderthals at the outset of the private war I had begun. I was—well, I must face it, I was scared.
As the blower vents started to pour a hurricane of air into the chambers of the great wheel, I leaped past them, flicked on the intercom switch, and bellowed, "Hit the bunks! Lie down and strap yourselves in! Fast!"
Skagarach had time for one approving look in my direction. "Good Companion!" he said. "You will do!" Then the three of us broke for the next room and the bunks.
CHAPTER XI
I had no intention of flinging myself onto a bunk. I let them do it, ran into the next chamber and hurled the door closed behind me. My order had carried throughout the station. In each of the rooms, otherwise soundproof, my order to lie down had been heard and followed.
I had counted upon the gradual raising of the wheel by the mirrors, and the tremendous pressure of the hundreds of blower vents, to create the illusion of upward motion. I had counted also on the Old Companions having no more idea than the average man in the street of what actually happened when a space ship took off. When the jet of one of those air vents hit a Neanderthal in the face, he naturally believed it to be the pressure on him of an accelerating motion straight up. And he listened to my broadcast advice, and hit for the bunks.