"Such language."
"It's still blurry. It's flashing on and off, red on and then off to white blank, red on again and off to white blank."
"While you were studying the manuals, need I remind you I was trying to learn how to cook for an interstellar clientele? What does the flashing red signal mean?"
"It means danger," Liddell said. "It means something's wrong and Luna out doesn't have time to tell us what. I don't want to scare you, but better drop your pots and pans and truck something up from the arsenal. I've got to stay by the screen."
There was a clatter as Linda called, "He doesn't want to scare me, the man says. What is it, creatures from outer space or something?"
"Very funny," Liddell said in a voice which clearly indicated he did not think it was particularly funny at all.
There was nothing on the screen now but the flashing red and white signal. The complete fragility of their position struck Liddell all at once. The transfer station was a steelite globe a sixteenth of a mile in diameter. It contained the sub-space transfer machinery, complete living quarters for Liddell and his wife and the private and public rooms of a small-sized hotel, as well as repair machinery, an arsenal and a library of the ten thousand six hundred and seventeen possible destinations for an outbound sub-space traveler.
If there was trouble, Liddell thought, any kind of serious trouble—he and Linda could do almost nothing about it. And if ever—for some reason the nightmare thought came to him unbidden—if ever they were set adrift from the transfer station, adrift in the featureless less-than vacuum of sub-space, as had happened once or twice before in the brief history of the service, they would float in a changeless insanity-ridden void forever, their bodily functions suspended indefinitely, only their minds working, fighting the sheer horror of nothingness....
"Here's the gun," Linda said. "Did you know you were covered with sweat, Lidd?"