Dave’s eyes scanned the instrument panel rapidly. Quickly, he ran to the emergency handle they’d used to cut the time speed of the machine. The handle had snapped up to the full-speed position again.
Dave looked at it mournfully. Then, suddenly, his face crumpled into a smile. “No use being grim, I guess. This old machine is just a stubborn cuss, that’s all.”
Together, he and Neil tried to force the handle down again. It wouldn’t budge at all.
“Say,” Doctor Manning’s booming voice cut in over the inter-com, “how much longer will you two be up there? We’re getting hungry.”
Dave smiled and spoke into the inter-com. “A few hours yet. You fellows go ahead and eat. We’ll have a bite up here.”
“Can’t you come down for a few minutes?” Doctor Manning complained.
“Impossible,” Dave answered. “Go on and eat.”
“Well, all right, if you say so.”
The speaker went dead.
“We’ve got to stay up here,” Dave explained. “There’s no telling what might happen.”
They slumped against the aluminum wall of the ship again, exhausted, waiting for the worst.
After five hours of top-speed travel, it happened.
At first, it was just a low rumble in the generator. Dave jumped to his feet immediately. He rushed to the inter-com and threw the switch. “Attention, down there. Attention! There’s going to be trouble. Adjust your safety belts immediately.”
Doctor Manning’s voice boomed into the control room. “Are you kidding us, Dave?”
The rumble in the generator grew louder. Spasmodically, the motor attached to the twin rotors began to cough.
“That’s an order,” Dave barked. “Adjust your safety belts at once!”
“Trouble, Dave?” Doctor Manning asked.
“Serious trouble,” Dave snapped. “Stand by for a crash landing, Doc.”
“Need any help up there?”
“Nope. Just adjust those safety belts and brace your…”
Suddenly, without warning, the machine began to tremble violently.
“Stand by,” Dave barked into the speaker.
The floor began to pitch beneath Neil’s feet. And then the machine began to spin crazily, round and round, over and over, like a mad plastic and aluminum pinwheel in the sky. Neil was smashed into the wail, his shoulder filling instantly with pain.
“We’re losing altitude,” Dave shouted above the roar of the throbbing generator and motor. He was lifted from his feet and sent scuttling across the floor. He bounced against the far wall, bounced off again, and was lifted into the air to crash with a sickening thud beside Neil. Neil staggered to his feet, clutching one of the wall lockers for support. The machine gave a final, frightening shudder and dropped like a stone. Neil’s fingers were pried loose from the wall locker, and he was flung backward against the instrument panel.
Wave after wave of grayness folded in on Neil, engulfing him, growing grayer and grayer, and then black, and blacker, and then there was nothing but the aching throb in his shoulder and the terrible sound that burst in his ears.
The machine seemed to erupt into a thousand living skyrockets that screamed in Neil’s head, shooting live sparks into every corner of his mind.
And above the scream of the skyrockets, there was a human scream that penetrated the darkness.
Beneath it all, like a tiny insistent hammer that pounded at his skull, Neil knew the machine had crashed, and before he dropped off into unconsciousness, he wondered vaguely where they were-and in what time.
Chapter 3
A Strange Ship
There was a lapping noise, like the sound of a stiff brush swishing against a starched shirt. Dimly, it reached into Neil’s mind, poked there insistently. His eyelids flickered, closed again. The swishing was somewhere above his head, but there was a pain in his right shoulder and he didn’t want to move, didn’t want to stir.
If only it weren’t for the swishing in his ears!
His lids struggled open, and a beam of sunlight burst in his eyes, causing him to squint.
He struggled to his knees and looked around him.
Something was wrong; something was all wrong.
The floor wasn’t straight any more. It curved gently like the rockers on a hobbyhorse. And there were portholes on the floor, and through the portholes there was a green swirling underfoot. Neil shook his head and blinked his eyes.
The instrument panel, which should have been against one of the aluminum, cylindrical walls of the control room, was now on the ceiling, directly overhead.
The hatchway from which the aluminum ladder led to the bubble below was now halfway up the wall on Neil’s right instead of on the floor, where it should have been. And the wall was flat, rather than slightly curved.
I’ve gone crazy, Neil thought. I’ve surely blown my cork.
And then, like the first feeble rays of dawn, Neil understood what the trouble was. He sighed in relief as he realized the machine was lying on its side. He was actually standing on one of the walls. And now, instead of one bubble being below and the other above the control room, one bubble would be to the right and the other to the left of it.
Suddenly Neil remembered Dave!
Frantically, his eyes widened as he scanned the machine quickly. His eyes stopped on what appeared to be a crumpled bundle of rags lying in a corner of the machine.
“Dave!” he shouted, running across the room as fast as he could on the curved floor. “Dave!”
He dropped to his knees beside his fallen friend and lifted his head into his lap. Carefully, almost tenderly, he brushed the hair off Dave’s forehead. A thin, pencil line of blood trickled from Dave’s left temple, down the side of his face, spilling over his jaw.
Neil reached for the handkerchief in the back pocket of his dungarees, and wiped the blood from his friend’s face.
Neil’s fingers quickly sought Dave’s wrist, and he let out a deep breath when he found a pulse there.
“Dave,” he said, gently, “Dave, can you hear me?”
The machine rolled under him, and he was aware of the roll but too occupied to interpret its meaning.
“Dave.”
Dave shook his head, almost as if he were scolding Neil for speaking. He shook it again, and his eyes suddenly popped open. He stared around the control room, a blank expression on his face.
“It’s all right, Dave,” Neil said, smiling.
Dave grinned then, and propped himself up on his elbows.
“Whew,” he said, shaking his head again. “That’ll teach me to cross streets against the lights, I guess.” He grinned again and sat up. “You all right, Neil?”
“I’m fine. How are you?”
“A little shaken. Otherwise-” Dave cut himself short, and looked quickly at the hatchway leading to the lower compartment. “Where are the others?” he snapped, wide-awake now, suddenly alert.
“I-I don’t know. You were the first-”
Dave was on his feet already and heading for the hatchway.
He was quick to understand the situation. “We’re on our side, I see.” He gripped the edge of the hatchway with his hands and pulled himself up. He dropped through on the other side and Neil scrambled after him.
Dave was standing stock-still beneath the aluminum ladder that now ran over their heads like a thin catwalk. Neil dropped down beside him, standing now on the plastic part of the bubble. He was surprised to see water beneath his feet, and outside through the clear plastic. Water, green, capped with white rolling breakers, stretching as far as he could see.
But Dave wasn’t looking out at the water. His eyes were opened wide, two white saucers perched on either side of his crooked, comical nose. He was staring at the limp form of Doctor Manning, hanging from his safety belt on the plastic wall opposite him. Below Doctor Manning, a pool of bright red blood was forming on the floor. To his right, just above the line of the water outside, the plastic wall was slashed in a jagged line, a gaping hole staring out at the green, rolling ocean.