"I felt sunk enough for a minute--I'm feeling better now, though, since you are taking it so calmly." "Sure--why not? A man's not dead until his heart stops beating, you know--our turn'll come next, when they let up a little." "But suppose they change the width of their slices, and hit this cubby, small as it is?" "It'd be just too bad," he shrugged. "In that case, we'd never know what hit us, so it's no good worrying about it. But say, we might do something at that, if they didn't hit us square. I can move fairly fast, and might be able to get a door open before the loss of pressure seals it. We'll light the flash ... here, you hold it, so that I can have both hands free. Put both arms around me, just under the arms, and stick to me like a porous plaster, because if I have to move at all, I'll have to jump like chain lightning. Shine the beam right over there, so it'll reflect and light up all the dials at once. There ... hold on tight! Here they come!" As he spoke, a jarring shudder shook one side of their hiding-place, then, a moment later, the phenomenon was repeated, but with much less force, upon the other side. Stevens sighed with relief, took the light, and extinguished it. "Missed us clean!" he exulted. "Now, if they don't find us, we're all set." "How can they possibly find us? I seem to be always worried about the wrong things, but I should think that their finding us would be the least of our troubles." "Don't judge their vision system by ours--they've got everything, apparently. However, their apparatus may not be delicate enough to spot us in a space this small when their projectors flash through it, as they probably will. Then, too, there's a couple of other big items in our favor--nobody else is in the entire lower half, since all this machinery down here is either automatic or else controlled from up above, so they won't be expecting to see anybody when they get down this far; and we aren't at all conspicuous. We're both dressed in gray--your clothes in particular are almost exactly the color of this armor-plate--so altogether we stand a good chance of being missed." "What shall we do now?" "Nothing whatever--wish we could sleep for a couple of hours, but of course there's no hope of that. Stretch out here, like that--you can't rest folded up like an accordion--and I'll lie down diagonally across the room. There's just room for me that way. That's one advantage of weightlessness--you can lie down standing on your head, and go to sleep and like it. But I forgot--you've never been weightless before, have you? Does it make you sick?" "Not so much, now, except that I feel awfully weird inside. I was horribly dizzy and nauseated at first, but it's going away." * * * * *