Through the ports nothing was to be seen now save fire. They were in an inferno of brilliant light and heat. But through the glare and smoke Sine saw a white-hot spot suddenly appear on the blister wall. The Jovians were melting their way through! The metal plates sagged like wet paper, dropped limply. Back of the hole, luridly illuminated, stood the foremost of a detachment of fighting men, eager to leap to the fray, waiting only for the metal to cool a little.
But the thermite had been burning steadily, biting through the tough skin of the metal moon. Just as the fugitives were beginning to wonder whether they would be incinerated in their self-made prison there was a lurch. Through the hull of their own vessel they could hear the tearing of metal as the weakened plates were sheared away. They found themselves in space, with the great ball of the Pleasure Bubble floating away from them. Just outside of the gaping hole in the sphere floated the bodies of twenty or thirty men, blown out by the escaping air.
The air was escaping in a prodigious geyser; unimpeded by an atmosphere, it spewed out, visible like a cloud due to its moisture, smooth like an inflating balloon without billows. The ball of vapor expanded swiftly toward the gray vastness of Jupiter 100,000 miles below, enveloping the fugitive ship for a time, then passing on, like an enormous milky white cloud, falling swiftly until it was lost in the darkness, still expanding.
Overhead The Bubble continued serenely on its course, the sweeping curve of its crystal hemisphere visible. But now the actinic lights that had served as artificial suns were dark. The great man-made paradise was as cold and dead as the Earth's moon. Death stalked its pleasure palaces. Already up there the pleasant rippling lakes must be skimmed over with ice, the luxuriant vegetation stiff, crackling with frost.
Despite the selfishness, the cruelty, the utter callousness of the First Race, Sine felt a pang of regret over the destruction of so much beauty.
A messenger from the astrogator's cabin, a man whose skin was seared and scorched so that it looked like an alligator's hide, touched Lents' arm.
"Jan would like to have you verify the course." There was apprehension in the man's voice. Member of a race so long enslaved, restrained, he feared the freedom of open space.
They swept slowly past The Bubble, gaining speed. Suddenly there was a cry from the stern look-out:
"The ship's heating. Stop it! Something's wrong."
Sine, rushing to answer the call, found that the ship was indeed heating up. Shielded from the sun's rays as they were, this was inexplicable. And then he saw the dull red pinpoint of light.