"Lucian!" said the fingers of Eyer. "Can you tell whether anything is happening to the rind?" Jeter hesitated for a long time. There was a distinct and almost nauseating vibration throughout all the space ship. And was there not something happening to the rind over a wide area, directly above the Jeter-Eyer plane? They could fancy the snapping of ice on a forest lake in mid-winter. They couldn't hear, in their suits. They could only feel. But all at once the outer rind, above their plane, vanished. At the same instant the plane itself, propeller still spinning, rose swiftly up through the hole in the rind. The air inside the globe was going out in a great rush. The partners looked at each other. At that moment the four planes swooped over the space ship.... * * * * * Jeter and Eyer knew that the inner globe had at last become visible, for from the bellies of the four planes dropped bomb after bomb. They fell into the great aperture. Jeter and Eyer flung themselves flat. But the bombs had worked sufficient havoc. They had removed all protection from the low-pressure stratosphere. The air inside the space ship went out with a rush. Jeter and Eyer, hearing nothing, though they knew that the explosions must have been cataclysmic, were picked up and whirled toward that opening, like chips spun toward the heart of a whirlpool. But for their space suits they would have been destroyed in the outrush of air. Out of the inner globe came men that flew, sprawled out, somersaulting up and out of apertures made by the crashing bombs. Ludicrous they looked. Blood streamed from their mouths. Their faces were set in masks of agony. There were Sitsumi and, one after another, the Three. Then fastened together by the cuffs, the partners were being whirled over and over, out into space. Their last signals to each other had been: "Even if you're already dead, pull the ripcord ring of your chute!" Crushed, buffeted, they still retained consciousness. They sought through the spinning stratosphere for their rescuers. Thousands of feet below--or was it above?--they saw them. Yes, below, for they looked at the tops of the planes. Their upward flight had been dizzying. They waited until their upward flight ceased. Then, as they started the long fall to Earth, they pulled their rings and waited for their chutes to flower above them. Soon they were floating downward. Side by side they rode. Above them their parachutes were like two umbrellas, pressed almost too closely together. They looked about them, seeking the space ship. The devastation of its outer rind had been complete, for they now could see the inner globe, and it too was like--well, like merely part of an eggshell.