What he was also Durham never heard. There was a crashing, roaring, rending impact. The chair went out from under him so that he fell face up into the ceiling. The lights went out entirely. He heard a thin faint sound that might have been Susan screaming. Then the ceiling slid away from him and spilled him down a wall. As he went scrabbling past the window he looked out and saw that there were now long vertical rents in the outer hull through which the stars were shining. The pumps had stopped. A long settling groan and then silence. The antigrav field was dead. Durham floated, along with everything else that was not bolted down. "Susan," he said. "Susan?" "Here." They met and clung together in mid air while the hull began a slow axial rotation around them. "What happened?" "We hit something." "The Senyans--" "They must all be done for. The hull is split open. Head-on ram, I think, just as we came out of overdrive. They wouldn't have had time to get space armor." "Then are we--" "Hush. Don't talk. Just wait and see." They clung together, silent. The hull turned without sound, and the stars shone in through the long slits, into the empty vacuum of the hold. "Lloyd, I can't breathe." "Yes you can. We still have as much air as ever. It just isn't circulating now." "I don't know if I can stand this, Lloyd. It's such an awful way." "There isn't any way that's good. It won't be so bad, really. You'll just go off to sleep." "Hold onto me?" "Sure." "Lloyd." "What?" "I'm sorry." "So am I." The hull turned and the stars glittered. The vitiated air grew foul, grew thick and leaden. The man and woman floated in the closed space, their arms tight around each other, their faces close together. Something jarred against the hull. "Lloyd! I see a light!" "It's only a star." "No. Look through the window. Moving--" Men, humans, wearing pressure suits, had come into the hull. Two of them were dragging oxygen bottles. They came up to the box and flashed their lights in through the windows. They knocked and made reassuring signs. After a minute or two fresh oxygen hissed in under pressure through the air duct. Susan laughed a little and then fainted. Durham still held her in his arms. Everything got pleasantly dark and far away, lost in the single simple joy of breathing. There were sounds and motions but he did not pay much attention to them, and he was mildly surprised when he happened to float past a window and noticed that now there was only space outside, very large and full of hot and splendid lights. When he passed the other window he saw part of a ship, and he understood that the box was being hoisted across the interval between it and the wreck. It seemed a remarkably kind dispensation of fortune to have provided a ship at exactly the right time and place, and not just any ship but one equipped with the specialized tackle required for moving heavy loads in space.