Nicky could not believe his eyes. He paused for an instant’s consideration. As a football-player hesitates a sixteenth of a second too long before he passes the ball or punts it, and so forfeits his opportunity, so Nicky Easton stood and stared for the length of time it takes the eyes to widen.
That was just too long for him and just long enough for 318 Davidge, who went at him football fashion, hurling himself through the air like a vast, sprawling tarantula. Nicky’s grip on the bomb relaxed. It fell from his hand. Davidge swiped at it wildly, smacked it, and knocked it out of bounds beyond the deck. Then Davidge’s hundred-and-eighty-pound weight smote the light and wickery frame of Nicky and sent him collapsing backward, staggering, wavering, till he, too, went overboard.
Davidge hit the deck like a ball-player sliding for a base, and he went slithering to the edge. He would have followed Nicky over the hundred-foot steel precipice if Mamise had not flung herself on him and caught his heel. He was stopped with his right arm dangling out in space and his head at the very margin of the deck.
In this very brief meanwhile Jake Nuddle, who had been panic-stricken at the sight of the bomb in Nicky’s hand, had been backing away slowly. He would have backed into the abyss if he had not struck a stanchion and clutched it desperately.
And now the infernal-machine reached bottom. It lighted on the huge blade of the ship’s anchor lying on a wharf waiting to be hoisted into place. The shell burst with an all-rending roar and sprayed rags of steel in every direction. The upward stream caught Nicky in midair and shattered him to shreds.
Nuddle’s whole back was obliterated and half a corpse fell forward, headless, on the deck. Davidge’s right arm was ripped from the shoulder and his hat vanished, all but the brim.
Mamise was untouched by the bombardment, but the downward rain of fragments tore her flesh as she lay sidelong.
The bomb, exploding in the open air, lost much of its efficiency, but the part of the ship nearest was crumpled like an old tomato-can that a boy has placed on a car track to be run over.
The crash with its reverberations threw the throngs about the speakers’ stands into various panics, some running away from the volcano, some toward it. Many people were knocked down and trampled.
Larrey and his men were the first to reach the deck. They found Davidge and Mamise in a pool of blood rapidly enlarging 319 as the torn arteries in Davidge’s shoulder spouted his life away. A quick application of first aid saved him until the surgeon attached to the shipyard could reach him.