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written in her eyes-eyes now enlarged,
staring, hard, brilliant, and full of soul-searching terror as she slumped
down, helpless but for his support. In the act
of exhaling as he was, lungs almost entirely empty" yet he held his breath
until he had seized the microphone from
his belt and had snapped the lever to "emergency." "Control room!" he gasped
then, and every speaker throughout
the great cruiser of the void blared out the warning as he forced his already
evacuated lungs to absolute emptiness.
"Vee-Two Gas! Get tight!"
Writhing and twisting in his fierce struggle to keep his lungs from gulping in
a draft of that noxious atmosphere,
and with the unconscious form of the girl draped limply over his left arm,
Costigan leaped towards the portal of the
nearest lifeboat. Orchestra instruments crashed to the floor and dancing
couples fell and sprawled inertly while the
tortured First Officer swung the door of the lifeboat open and dashed across
the tiny room to the air-valves.
Throwing them wide open, he put his mouth to the orifice and let his laboring
lungs gasp their eager fill of the cold
blast roaring from the tanks. Then" air-hunger partially assuaged, he again
held his breath, broke open the emer-
gency locker, donned one of the space-suits always kept there, and opened its
valves wide in order to flush out of
his uniform any lingering trace of the lethal gas.
He then leaped back to his companion. Shutting off the air, he released a
stream of pure oxygen, held her face in it,
and made shift to force some of it into her lungs by compressing and releasing
her chest against his own body.
Soon she drew a spasmodic breath, choking and coughing, and he again changed
the gaseous stream to one of pure
air" speaking urgently as she showed signs of returning .consciousness.
"Stand up!" he snapped. "Hang on to this brace and keep your face in this
air-stream until I get a suit around you!
Got me!"
She nodded weakly, and, assured that she could bold herself at the valve, it
was the work of only a minute to encase
her in one of the protective coverings. Then, as she sat upon a bench,
recovering her strength. he flipped on the
lifeboat's visiphone projector and shot its invisible beam up into the control
room, where he saw space-armored
figures curiously busy at the panels.
"Dirty work at the cross-roads!" he blazed to his captain, man to
man-formality disregarded, as it so often was in
the Triplanetary service. "There's skulduggery afoot somewhere in our primary
air! Maybe that's the way they got
those other two ships-pirates! Might have been a timed bomb-don't see how
anybody could have stowed away down
there through the inspections, and nobody but Franklin can neutralize the
shield of the air room-but I'm going to
look around, anyway. Then I'll join you fellows up there."
"What was it?" the shaken girl asked. "I think that I remember your saying
"Vee-Two gas." That's forbidden! Anyway,
I owe you my life, Conway, and I'll never forget it-never. Thanks-but the
others-how about all the rest of us?"
"It was Vee-Two, and it is forbidden," Costigan replied grimly, eyes fast upon
the flashing plate, whose point of
projection was now deep in the bowels of the vessel. "The penalty for using it
or having it is death on sight.
Gangsters and pirates use it, since they have nothing to lose, being on the
death list already. As for your life, I
haven't saved it yet-you may wish I'd let it ride before we get done. The
others are too far gone for oxygen-couldn't
have brought even you around in a few more seconds, quick as I got to you. But
there's a sure antidote-we all carry
it in a lock-box in our armor-and we all know how to use it, because crooks
all use Vee-Two and so we're always
expecting it. But since the air will be pure again in half an hour we'll be
able to revive the others easily enough if
we can get by with whatever is going to happen next. There's the bird that did
it, right in the air-room. It's the Chief
Engineer's suit, but that isn't Franklin that's in it. Some
passenger-disguised-slugged the Chief-took his suit and
projectors-hole in duct-p-s-s-t! All washed out! Maybe that's all he was
scheduled to do to us in this performance,
but he'll do something else in his life."
"Don't go down there!" protested the girl. "His armor is so much better than
that emergency suit you are wearing,
and he's got Mr. Franklin's Lewiston, besides!"
"Don't be an idiot!" he snapped. "We can't have a live pirate aboard-we're
going to be altogether too busy with
outsiders directly. Don't worry, I'm not going to give him a break. I'll take
a Standish-I'll rub him out like a blot.
Stay right here until I come back after you," he commanded, and the heavy door
of the lifeboat clanged shut behind
him as he leaped out into the promenade. Straight across the saloon he made
his way, paying no attention to the
inert forms scattered here and there. Going up to a blank wall, he manipulated
an almost invisible dial set flush with
its surface, swung a heavy door aside, and lifted out the Standish-a fearsome
weapon. Squat" huge, and heavy, it
resembled somewhat an overgrown machine rifle, but one possessing a thick,
short telescope" with several opaque
condensing lenses and parabolic reflectors. Laboring under the weight of the
thing, he strode along corridors and
clambered heavily down short stairways. Finally he came to the purifier room,
and grinned savagely as he saw the
greenish haze of light obscuring the door and walls-the shield was still in
place; the pirate was still inside, stilt
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