She clung to him, shivering.

“I ... think,” she said unsteadily, “that we’re going to die. Aren’t we?”

“We’ll see,” he told her. “Hold on to me.”

Guided by the emergency light, he scrambled to the bank of communicator-buttons. What had been the floor was now a side wall. He climbed it and thumbed the navigation-room switch.

“Radar room reporting,” he said curtly. “Power out, gravity off, no reports from outside from power failure. No great physical damage.”

He began to hear other voices. There had never been an actual space-collision in the memory of man, but reports came crisply, and the cut-in speakers in the radar room repeated them. Ship-gravity was out all over the ship. Emergency lights were functioning, and were all the lights there were. There was a slight, unexplained gravity-drift toward what had been the ship’s port side. But damage-control reported no loss of pressure in the Niccola’s inner hull, though four areas between inner and outer hulls had lost air pressure to space.

“Mr. Baird,” rasped the skipper. “We’re blind! Forget everything else and give us eyes to see with!”

“We’ll try battery power to the vision plates,” Baird told Diane. “No full resolution, but better than nothing—”

They worked together, feverishly. They were dizzy. Something close to nausea came upon them from pure giddiness. What had been the floor was now a wall, and they had to climb to reach the instruments that had been on a wall and now were on the ceiling. But their weight was ounces only. Baird said abruptly:

“I know what’s the matter! We’re spinning! The whole ship’s spinning! That’s why we’re giddy and why we have even a trace of weight. Centrifugal force! Ready for the current?”

There was a tiny click, and the battery light dimmed. But a vision screen lighted faintly. The stars it showed were moving specks of light. The sun passed deliberately across the screen. Baird switched to other outside scanners. There was power for only one screen at a time. But he saw the starkly impossible. He pressed the navigation-room button.

“Radar room reporting,” he said urgently. “The Plumie ship is fast to us, in contact with our hull! Both ships are spinning together!” He was trying yet other scanners as he spoke, and now he said: “Got it! There are no lines connecting us to the Plumie, but it looks ... yes! That flash when the 

 Prev. P 15/36 next