Nauseated, trembling, Bob Star forced his eyes open.
He peered uneasily at Kay Nymidee and the others—he dared not look again into that giddy void.
Jay Kalam was gravely alert.
Hal Samdu seemed grimly belligerent, but Giles Habibula was still greenishly ill.
“We must lose no time,” Jay Kalam went on decisively.
“The slaves are bewildered for the moment.
But they saw the door open, and they’ll report what happened.
The Cometeers themselves won’t be so easy to confuse.
Somehow, we must reach the green globe.”
Bob Star stole an apprehensive glance at it—a small, dun green sun, far out in that sickening chasm of spinning emptiness.
“How can we get there?” he whispered.
“It’s miles and miles away —and floating free—”
“Not floating,” Jay Kalam said.
“It must be suspended by those tubular fields.
But still,” he admitted, “there’s nothing we can climb.”
“Then,” Bob Star whispered hopelessly, “how—?”
The commander said quietly,
“We can jump.”
Bob Star gaped.
“Jump?”
“Certainly.
There’s no gravitation here to stop us.
If we don’t miss the globe, and go sailing on beyond—”
Instinctively, Bob Star’s hands clutched at the railing beside the great door.
Even the idea of a plunging fall through that directionless pit made him sick again.
But Jay Kalam made them all crouch in a little circle upon the jewel-hard surface of the mighty door, holding hands.
He had fastened the red, rectangular metal case to his belt, they all clung to the wires that ran from it.
“When I give the word,” he said, “we all jump toward the green sphere.”
To Bob Star, it began to spin again, over and under him.
It took all his will to keep his eyes upon it.
Dimly, he heard the commander counting.
He heard the quiet, “Now!”
He leapt, with all his strength, into that dizzy gulf.
For a moment he was too ill to be aware of anything.
Then he knew that they were all clinging together, a helpless little huddle of flying figures, drifting through the confused vastness of a hollow world.
The green sphere seemed a very tiny and distant goal.
And they were quite helpless now to stop or turn.
“I’m afraid,” said Jay Kalam, “that we’re going to one side.”
It was very strange, to Bob Star, to hear that voice, as always cool and grave and perfectly modulated.
A frightened whisper, a choking gasp, a scream, would have been in better keeping with the nightmarish horror of that flight.
For the small green sun was whirling over and under them again.
All meaning and direction had vanished from the vastness of that dim cavern.
His sickness came back, made intolerable by the lack of anything substantial to cling to.
He compressed his lips in silent agony.
“The damned Cometeers—these on guard?” he heard Hal Samdu’s booming question.
“Won’t they see us?”
“Not so long as we hold these wires,” Jay Kalam answered.
“Though, of course, it’s possible, they may detect us with other senses than sight.”
Fighting his sickness, Bob Star looked along the glistening red wire that he grasped, to the instrument at Jay Kalam’s belt.
“We aren’t—?” he gasped.