Strange. The cold was not penetrating at all. Even at the several points where his body and limbs made contact with the distended space suit, no sensation of coolness struck through. His feet were moist and hot on the heavy cork soles.
He stared briefly at the two bodies near his feet. They were beyond explaining anything. The smell of death came back to his nostrils. Right through his helmet? There was no smell out there. The smell was in here. With him. Power of suggestion? The navigator had said he would die. Sure. A safe statement. Nobody lived forever. But he'd live long enough to enjoy his cut of this little deal.
His cut. The officer had said it would be a shove out into space. The death smell. His own death, perhaps. He laughed softly, and the sound of his voice thudded back to his ears like the intimate murmurings of a stethoscope. It was intimate in here. Every little whisper of breath he took rustled loudly.
Deliberately he cleared his throat and coughed. The sound was almost metallic. It hurt his ears. Mingled with the tepid moisture of his own breath was the faint odor of the powerful dessicant that ringed the base of the helmet.
His eyes dropped to the row of tiny dials set just within eye-range under his chin. Suit pressure, O. K. Oxygen, O. K. Humidity—the needle lay right on the red line. Well, when he stopped sweating from his scare that should drop off. Body temperature, one hundred one.
One-oh-one? Ninety-eight plus, he remembered from upper school hygiene, was normal. Over a hundred was not so good.
Sit down, Frane. Relax. Get your breathing slowed down. Cool off.
He took the captain's comfortable chair before the low control panel. He stared out into the incredible blackness of space, out where not the tiniest diffusion from the starlight eased the utter darkness between constellations.
Somewhere in the ship's electric generation system a moving part, brittle with the cold and contracted within its bearing, vibrated briefly and shattered. The control-room twilight flared and died out into a shadowless night.
Frane had the sensation of being projected out among the stars. Loneliness pushed in on him. He realized cynically that even the two corpses had been better than this isolation.