eager hands pulled them back into the station. for a moment there were the reassuring sounds as their helmets were unscrewed. then the familiar smells and shape of the structure that had been home for so long. now that haven was about to destroy itself.
then morrow remembered the earth rocket that had brought senator mckelvie to the great white sausage in space.
that rocket still contained a small quantity of fuel.
if fired at the precise moment, that fuel, anchored with the rocket in the hub socket, might be enough to lift the entire station.
he shouted instructions and men raced to obey. kevin, himself, raced into the nearest tube. there was no sound, but ahead of him the hatch was open to the discharge chamber. he leaped into the zero gravity room.
mckelvie was crawling through the connecting port into the feeder rocket. kevin sprawled headlong into gordon. the recoil threw them apart, but gordon recovered balance first.
he had a gun.
"get back," he snarled. "we're going down." he laughed sharply, near hysteria. "we're going down to tell the world how you fried—through error and mismanagement."
"you messed up those lines," kevin said. it didn't matter now. he only hoped to hold gordon long enough for diversionary help to come out of the tube.
"yes," gordon leered. "we fixed the lines. the senator wasn't sure we should, but i helped him over his squeamishness, and now we'll crack the whip when we get back home."
"you won't make it," kevin said. "we're still more than 600 miles high. the glide pattern in that rocket is built to take you down from 500 miles."
mckelvie's head appeared in the hatch. he was desperately afraid.
"you said you could fly this thing, gordon. can you?"
max nodded his head rapidly, like a schoolboy asked to recite a lesson he has not studied.
kevin was against the bulkhead. now he pushed himself slowly forward.
"stay back or i'll shoot?" gordon screamed. instead, he leaped backward through the hatch.
hampered by his original slow motion, kevin could not move faster until he reached another solid surface.
the hatch slammed shut before his grasping fingers touched it.
a wrenching tug jostled the space station structure. the rocket was gone, and with it the power that might have saved all of them.
morrow ran again. he had not stopped running since the beginning of this nightmare.
he tumbled over bert and jones in the tube. they scrambled after him back to the control room. the three men watched through the port.
"if he doesn't hit the atmosphere too quick, too hard ..." kevin whispered. his fists were clenched. he felt no malice at this moment. he did not wish them death. there was no sound in the radio. the plummeting projectile was a tiny black dot, vanishing below and behind them.
when the end came, it was a mote of orange red, then a dazzling smear of white fire as the rocket ripped into the atmosphere at nearly 20,000 miles an hour.
"they're dead!" jones voice choked with disbelief. kevin nodded, but it was a flashing thing that lost meaning for him in the same instant. he knew that unless a miracle happened, ninety men in his command would meet the same fate.
