Extraterrestrial beings -- Fiction; Science fiction; Space flight -- Fiction
He clutched crazily at anything, and called her name again. The
_Niccola's_ internal gravity was cut off, and his head spun, and he heard
collision-doors closing everywhere, but before they closed completely he
heard the rasping sound of giant arcs leaping in the engine room. Then
there was silence.
"Diane!" cried Baird fiercely. "Diane!"
"I'm ... here," she panted. "I'm dizzy, but I ... think I'm all right--"
The battery-powered emergency light came on. It was faint, but he saw her
clinging to a bank of instruments where she'd been thrown by the
collision. He moved to go to her, and found himself floating in midair.
But he drifted to a side wall and worked his way to her.
She clung to him, shivering.
"I ... think," she said unsteadily, "that we're going to die. Aren't we?"
"We'll see," he told her. "Hold on to me."
Guided by the emergency light, he scrambled to the bank of
communicator-buttons. What had been the floor was now a side wall. He
climbed it and thumbed the navigation-room switch.
"Radar room reporting," he said curtly. "Power out, gravity off, no
reports from outside from power failure. No great physical damage."
He began to hear other voices. There had never been an actual
space-collision in the memory of man, but reports came crisply, and the
cut-in speakers in the radar room repeated them. Ship-gravity was out all
over the ship. Emergency lights were functioning, and were all the lights
there were. There was a slight, unexplained gravity-drift toward what had
been the ship's port side. But damage-control reported no loss of
pressure in the _Niccola's_ inner hull, though four areas between inner
and outer hulls had lost air pressure to space.
"_Mr. Baird_," rasped the skipper. "_We're blind! Forget everything else
and give us eyes to see with!_"
"We'll try battery power to the vision plates," Baird told Diane. "No
full resolution, but better than nothing--"
They worked together, feverishly. They were dizzy. Something close to
nausea came upon them from pure giddiness. What had been the floor was
now a wall, and they had to climb to reach the instruments that had been
on a wall and now were on the ceiling. But their weight was ounces only.
Baird said abruptly:
"I know what's the matter! We're spinning! The whole ship's spinning!
That's why we're giddy and why we have even a trace of weight.
Centrifugal force! Ready for the current?"
There was a tiny click, and the battery light dimmed. But a vision screen
lighted faintly. The stars it showed were moving specks of light. The sun
passed deliberately across the screen. Baird switched to other outside
scanners. There was power for only one screen at a time. But he saw the
starkly impossible. He pressed the navigation-room button.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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