He got a grip on himself, forced himself to sit down again in the corner, back to the bulkhead, feet thrust against the stanchion. The body of the Martian, he saw, was sliding in erratic circles about the deck. Gavin wet his lips, his blue eyes desperate. He had scarcely settled himself when the third explosion burst. It was so close that there was no sound, only a terrific blast of pressure. The lights dimmed. Gavin was torn from his stanchion and hurled across the cabin against the opposite bulkhead. Fortunately, he didn't strike the unguarded steel. Instead he was flung against the Martian's body which acted as a pad. Even so the shock was terrific. Blackness welled up behind his eyes. He lost consciousness. Gavin opened his eyes and realized he couldn't have been unconscious but a second or two. He sprang to his feet. And struck his head and shoulders on the ceiling! He gave himself a push from the overhead and floated slowly back to the deck. Then he realized what was wrong. The jets were quiet. A silence so absolute that it rang in his ears blanketed the Nova. In all that ship there was no sound anywhere. The Nova was falling free, falling back to the surface of Venus! IV The skin was stretched taut across Gavin's gaunt features, the freckles standing out like pennies. The air, rapidly growing denser, began to whine like the keening for the dead. He stiffened, straining to catch the sound he had imagined. It came again. The cough of a rocket tube. A wild hope flamed in Gavin's blue eyes. The roar of the jets blasted into life. The cabin heeled sharply to starboard. Gavin slid down the sloping deck until he fetched up against the bulkhead, which had suddenly become the floor. The Nova, he realized in a flood of relief, had come out of the fall and was speeding parallel to the surface. He sat down, his joints turning to water. He had a violent urge to be sick. Gavin's first belief that the attacking ship had been one of Terra's patrol spacers gave way to doubt. In the first place, the Nova hadn't been beyond Venus' thousand-mile-limit. Furthermore, he didn't believe a Terran patrol ship would have waylaid the Nova outward bound when she was innocent of her cargo of slaves. Then who was it? He heard a bolt click back. The door through which he had entered was directly overhead. The Nova, though, had been constructed for flying either keel-on or stern-down. The passages which previously had been horizontal were now vertical, and the vertical wells running from bow to stern lay horizontal to the angle of flight. A door which had been overhead when they were shooting straight up, now was directly across the cabin. As Gavin watched, it swung open. Nadia Petrovna was framed in the opening. She said in a breathless tight voice, "You've got to take over the engine room! Half the black gang are dead or laid up! Captain Cabot sent me to fetch you!"