"Nils?"
"I'm okay," he managed to mutter.
What would it be like? How fast would you go? And what would you see, down there on the bottom of the liquid layer of the Uranian atmosphere? There would probably be more of those funny brittle yellow plants that sometimes floated even this high; but no man had ever explored the floor of the liquid air. Would it be smooth, like a ball?
Kerr would be down there to keep him company.
Damn it, he'd liked Kerr.
Was it his imagination, or was he really starting to slip? The trouble was that there wasn't anything he could use to measure by, no fixed point to tell whether he was already going down or not.
But once the air line broke, he'd be dead like that. He'd never see the bottom even when he got there.
Hundreds of millions of miles! "Eric!"
Petrone's voice said, "What?"
But Nils ignored him.